UMD Researchers Organize NeurIPS Competition to Improve AI Watermarks

As AI-generated images become increasingly more realistic, they present both opportunities and challenges. While such advancements can enable creative applications and enhance visual storytelling, they can also fuel the spread of disinformation or cast doubt on the validity of authentic photographs. This glaring dichotomy highlights the high-stakes challenge of determining the origin and authenticity of online images.

One approach for establishing whether an image is AI-generated is through watermarking—the process of embedding a unique signal into an image to indicate its origin. While this method can be applied to any image, it is often proposed as a promising solution for identifying AI-generated content. These digital watermarks, however, can be altered or removed by malicious users, raising questions about their reliability and long-term efficacy.

To address these concerns, a team led by University of Maryland researchers recently held an international AI watermark-removal competition. The contest —held last December during the annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024)—was open to researchers worldwide, challenging participants to remove invisible watermarks from AI-generated images. The goal was to rigorously test the robustness of various watermarking techniques while also identifying potential vulnerabilities.

“We wanted to determine how well watermarks could withstand real-world manipulation—to unearth their vulnerabilities and weaknesses,” says Furong Huang, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland who was a lead organizer of the event.

Huang says the idea for the competition came about through a casual chat between academics, including Tom Goldstein, a professor of computer science at UMD, and other researchers and faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Google DeepMind.

Both Huang and Goldstein have appointments in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), which provided technical support for the event and partnered with watermarking startup Trufo to offer cash prizes for contestants totaling $7,000.

The contest—officially known as Erasing the Invisible: A Stress-Test Challenge for Image Watermarks—received an impressive 2,722 submissions, a turnout that exceeded Huang’s expectations, demonstrating a strong interest from the AI community in tackling the challenges of watermarking.

Click HERE to read the full article