Editing Away the Evidence: Diffusion-Based Image Manipulation and the Failure Modes of Robust Watermarking

Electrical Engineering and Systems Science > Image and Video Processing [Submitted on 13 Mar 2026] Editing Away the Evidence: Diffusion-Based Image Manipulation and the Failure Modes of Robust Watermarking Qian Qi, Jiangyun Tang, Jim Lee, Emily Davis, Finn Carter Robust invisible watermarks are widely used to support copyright protection, content provenance, and accountability by embedding hidden signals designed to survive common post-processing operations. However, diffusion-based image editing introduces a fundamentally different class of transformations: it injects noise and reconstructs images through a powerful generative prior, often altering semantic content while preserving photorealism. In this paper, we provide a unified theoretical and empirical analysis showing that non-adversarial diffusion editing can unintentionally degrade or remove robust watermarks. We model diffusion editing as a stochastic transformation that progressively contracts off-manifold perturbations, causing the low-amplitude signals used by many watermarking schemes to decay. Our analysis derives bounds on watermark signal-to-noise ratio and mutual information along diffusion trajectories, yielding conditions under which reliable recovery becomes information-theoretically impossible. We further evaluate representative watermarking systems under a range of diffusion-based editing scenarios and strengths. The results indicate that even routine semantic edits can significantly reduce watermark recoverability. Finally, we discuss the implications for content provenance and outline principles for designing watermarking approaches that remain robust under generative image editing. Comments: Preprint Subjects: Image and Video Processing (eess.IV); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Multimedia (cs.MM) Cite as: arXiv:2603.12949 [eess.IV]   (or arXiv:2603.12949v1 [eess.IV] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.12949 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Finn Carter [view email] [v1] Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:46:27 UTC (115 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: eess.IV < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.CR cs.MM eess References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)