Attack-Resistant Watermarking for AIGC Image Forensics via Diffusion-based Semantic Deflection

Qingyu Liu, Yitao Zhang, Zhongjie Ba, Chao Shuai, Peng Cheng, Tianhang Zheng, Zhibo Wang

International Conference on Learning Representations 2026 (ICLR 2026) Conference

Protecting the copyright of user-generated AI images is an emerging challenge as AIGC becomes pervasive in creative workflows. Existing watermarking methods (1) remain vulnerable to real-world adversarial threats, often forced to trade off between defenses against spoofing and removal attacks; and (2) cannot support semantic-level tamper localization. We introduce PAI, a training-free inherent watermarking framework for AIGC copyright protection, plug-and-play with diffusion-based AIGC services. PAI simultaneously provides three key functionalities: robust ownership verification, attack detection, and semantic-level tampering localization. Unlike existing inherent watermark methods that only embed watermarks at noise initialization of diffusion models, we design a novel key-conditioned deflection mechanism that subtly steers the denoising trajectory according to the user key. Such trajectory-level coupling further strengthens the semantic entanglement of identity and content, thereby further enhancing robustness against real-world threats. Moreover, we also provide a theoretical analysis proving that only the valid key can pass verification. Experiments across 12 attack methods show that PAI achieves 98.43\% verification accuracy, improving over SOTA methods by 37.25\% on average, and retains strong tampering localization performance even against advanced AIGC edits. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/QingyuLiu/PAI}.