Your Text Encoder Can Be An Object-Level Watermarking Controller

Naresh Kumar Devulapally, Mingzhen Huang, Vishal Asnani, Shruti Agarwal, Siwei Lyu, Vishnu Suresh Lokhande; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025, pp. 16576-16585

Invisible watermarking of AI-generated images can help with copyright protection, enabling detection and identification of AI-generated media. In this work, we present a novel approach to watermark images of T2I Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs). By only fine-tuning text token embeddings \mathcal W _*, we enable watermarking in selected objects or parts of the image, offering greater flexibility compared to traditional full-image watermarking. Our method leverages the text encoder's compatibility across various LDMs, allowing plug-and-play integration for different LDMs. Moreover, introducing the watermark early in the encoding stage improves robustness to adversarial perturbations in later stages of the pipeline. Our approach achieves 99% bit accuracy (48 bits) with a 10^5 xreduction in model parameters, enabling efficient watermarking.