Watermark Fragility Under Diffusion-Based Image Editing

arXiv 2603.04696·medium signal

Proves theoretically and empirically that invisible watermark payloads (designed to survive JPEG, cropping, noise) are systematically destroyed by diffusion-based image editing. Watermarks behave as low-energy high-frequency signals that get attenuated in forward diffusion and treated as noise in reverse. Mutual information between watermark and edited output decays to zero as editing strength increases. Directly relevant to the SynthID vulnerability trending topic — as diffusion editing becomes