Rel-Zero: Harnessing Patch-Pair Invariance for Robust Zero-Watermarking Against AI Editing

Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition [Submitted on 18 Mar 2026] Rel-Zero: Harnessing Patch-Pair Invariance for Robust Zero-Watermarking Against AI Editing Pengzhen Chen, Yanwei Liu, Xiaoyan Gu, Xiaojun Chen, Wu Liu, Weiping Wang Recent advancements in diffusion-based image editing pose a significant threat to the authenticity of digital visual content. Traditional embedding-based watermarking methods often introduce perceptible perturbations to maintain robustness, inevitably compromising visual fidelity. Meanwhile, existing zero-watermarking approaches, typically relying on global image features, struggle to withstand sophisticated manipulations. In this work, we uncover a key observation: while individual image patches undergo substantial alterations during AI-based editing, the relational distance between patch pairs remains relatively invariant. Leveraging this property, we propose Relational Zero-Watermarking (Rel-Zero), a novel framework that requires no modification to the original image but derives a unique zero-watermark from these editing-invariant patch relations. By grounding the watermark in intrinsic structural consistency rather than absolute appearance, Rel-Zero provides a non-invasive yet resilient mechanism for content authentication. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Rel-Zero achieves substantially improved robustness across diverse editing models and manipulations compared to prior zero-watermarking approaches. Comments: accepted to CVPR 2026 Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2603.17531 [cs.CV]   (or arXiv:2603.17531v1 [cs.CV] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.17531 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Pengzhen Chen [view email] [v1] Wed, 18 Mar 2026 09:40:00 UTC (6,595 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CV < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI cs.CR 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?)