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arXiv · 2605.19511

Are Watermarked Images Editable? SafeMark for Watermark-Preserving Text-Guided Image Editing

Xiaodong Wu·Qi Li·Xiangman Li·Zelin Zhang·Lingshuang Liu·Jianbing Ni
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Abstract

This paper investigates a fundamental yet underexplored question: can watermarked images remain editable without compromising watermark integrity? We propose SafeMark, a framework for watermark-preserving text-guided image manipulation that explicitly integrates watermark integrity into the editing process. Specifically, SafeMark adds a thresholded watermark-decoding loss directly to the diffusion editor's training objective, fine-tuning the editor so that semantically valid edits also preserve the embedded watermark at the final output. This design admits a clean information-theoretic justification: maintaining high bit-accuracy on the edited image lower-bounds the mutual information that the editor channel preserves between watermark and edited output, the quantity that fundamentally controls watermark recoverability. SafeMark is compatible with differentiable diffusion-based editors, and requires no architectural modification. Extensive evaluations across multiple datasets, text-guided editing methods, and post-edit distortion settings demonstrate that SafeMark achieves high watermark bit accuracy across diverse editing settings while maintaining high-quality semantic edits, without sacrificing robustness to common post-edit distortions. These results demonstrate that semantic editability and watermark integrity are fundamentally compatible, enabling trustworthy image provenance in generative editing pipelines.

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Xiaodong Wu, Qi Li, Xiangman Li, Zelin Zhang, Lingshuang Liu, Jianbing Ni. 2026-05-19. Are Watermarked Images Editable? SafeMark for Watermark-Preserving Text-Guided Image Editing. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19511

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