ProMark: Proactive Diffusion Watermarking for Causal Attribution

Vishal Asnani, John Collomosse, Tu Bui, Xiaoming Liu, Shruti Agarwal; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 10802-10811

Generative AI (GenAI) is transforming creative workflows through the capability to synthesize and manipulate images via high-level prompts. Yet creatives are not well supported to receive recognition or reward for the use of their content in GenAI training. To this end we propose ProMark a causal attribution technique to attribute a synthetically generated image to its training data concepts like objects motifs templates artists or styles. The concept information is proactively embedded into the input training images using imperceptible watermarks and the diffusion models (unconditional or conditional) are trained to retain the corresponding watermarks in generated images. We show that we can embed as many as 2^ 16 unique watermarks into the training data and each training image can contain more than one watermark. ProMark can maintain image quality whilst outperforming correlation-based attribution. Finally several qualitative examples are presented providing the confidence that the presence of the watermark conveys a causative relationship between training data and synthetic images.