RADIUM: RadioActive Decay of Image-Underlaid Marks

Modern image generative models are able to produce photorealistic images. As those images become increasingly indistinguishable from real data and are published online, they are often scraped for subsequent training runs of new generative models. This practice of training on generated data has been shown to degrade model performance and cause model collapse. A possible mitigation lies in embedding radioactive watermarks into generated content. Radioactive watermarks are robust marks that are detectable in outputs of new models trained on watermarked data, enabling provenance tracing of generated content. In this work, we analyze the persistence of image watermarks across multiple training-generation runs. To do so, we introduce a novel statistical testing method RADIUM (RadioActive Decay of Image-Underlaid Marks) for reliable radioactivity detection across various watermarking methods. Using our RADIUM method, we observe disparate radioactivity across watermarking methods for image generative models. Only few watermarks remain detectable in subsequently trained models, while most decay severely, especially when the architecture of models differs. Our analysis highlights the critical need for more radioactive watermarking methods in the vision domain.