Weiping Wang
Publications
Rotation-Invariant Spherical Watermarking via Third-Order SO(3) Representation Coupling
Reliable watermarking of panoramic imagery is fundamentally challenged by arbitrary 3D rotations. As panoramas are defined on the sphere, they naturally transform under the action of $SO(3)$, rendering conventional planar representations and augmentation-based robustness strategies inadequate and devoid of theoretical guarantees. To address this, we formulate panoramas as spherical signals and leverage $SO(3)$ representation theory to derive provably rotation-invariant descriptors. While spherical harmonic coefficients transform equivariantly under rotations, the natural invariant constructions are typically limited to zeroth-order statistics which eliminate directional information and severely constrain embedding capacity. In this work, we introduce a principled third-order invariant construction by coupling higher-order $SO(3)$ irreducible representations via tensor products and projecting onto the trivial representation. This yields a spherical invariant bispectrum that preserves phase information while remaining strictly rotation-invariant. Leveraging this property, we embed watermarks into higher-order spherical harmonic coefficients and recover them from invariant bispectral scalars, enabling reliable extraction under arbitrary 3D rotations. We provide a theoretical proof of $SO(3)$ invariance for it and demonstrate experimentally its near-perfect robustness to continuous rotations while maintaining high visual fidelity.
Rel-Zero: Harnessing Patch-Pair Invariance for Robust Zero-Watermarking Against AI Editing
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.
Backdoor Sentinel: Detecting and Detoxifying Backdoors in Diffusion Models via Temporal Noise Consistency
Diffusion models have been widely deployed in AIGC services; however, their reliance on opaque training data and procedures exposes a broad attack surface for backdoor injection. In practical auditing scenarios, due to the protection of intellectual property and commercial confidentiality, auditors are typically unable to access model parameters, rendering existing white-box or query-intensive detection methods impractical. More importantly, even after the backdoor is detected, existing detoxification approaches are often trapped in a dilemma between detoxification effectiveness and generation quality. In this work, we identify a previously unreported phenomenon called temporal noise unconsistency, where the noise predictions between adjacent diffusion timesteps is disrupted in specific temporal segments when the input is triggered, while remaining stable under clean inputs. Leveraging this finding, we propose Temporal Noise Consistency Defense (TNC-Defense), a unified framework for backdoor detection and detoxification. The framework first uses the adjacent timestep noise consistency to design a gray-box detection module, for identifying and locating anomalous diffusion timesteps. Furthermore, the framework uses the identified anomalous timesteps to construct a trigger-agnostic, timestep-aware detoxification module, which directly corrects the backdoor generation path. This effectively suppresses backdoor behavior while significantly reducing detoxification costs. We evaluate the proposed method under five representative backdoor attack scenarios and compare it with state-of-the-art defenses. The results show that TNC-Defense improves the average detection accuracy by $11\%$ with negligible additional overhead, and invalidates an average of $98.5\%$ of triggered samples with only a mild degradation in generation quality.
Attesting Model Lineage by Consisted Knowledge Evolution with Fine-Tuning Trajectory
The fine-tuning technique in deep learning gives rise to an emerging lineage relationship among models. This lineage provides a promising perspective for addressing security concerns such as unauthorized model redistribution and false claim of model provenance, which are particularly pressing in \textcolor{blue}{open-weight model} libraries where robust lineage verification mechanisms are often lacking. Existing approaches to model lineage detection primarily rely on static architectural similarities, which are insufficient to capture the dynamic evolution of knowledge that underlies true lineage relationships. Drawing inspiration from the genetic mechanism of human evolution, we tackle the problem of model lineage attestation by verifying the joint trajectory of knowledge evolution and parameter modification. To this end, we propose a novel model lineage attestation framework. In our framework, model editing is first leveraged to quantify parameter-level changes introduced by fine-tuning. Subsequently, we introduce a novel knowledge vectorization mechanism that refines the evolved knowledge within the edited models into compact representations by the assistance of probe samples. The probing strategies are adapted to different types of model families. These embeddings serve as the foundation for verifying the arithmetic consistency of knowledge relationships across models, thereby enabling robust attestation of model lineage. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness and resilience of our approach in a variety of adversarial scenarios in the real world. Our method consistently achieves reliable lineage verification across a broad spectrum of model types, including classifiers, diffusion models, and large language models.