Hidden in Plain Tokens: Simply Robust, Gradient-Free Watermark for Synthetic Audio

As policy catches up with the capabilities of generative AI, watermarking is central to content provenance efforts. Inference-time watermarks for autoregressive models are unfit for continuous modalities due to discretization inconsistencies. Existing methods overcome this by finetuning the modality tokenizers, nullifying the watermark's training-free advantage. In this work, motivated by the vocabulary redundancy of discretization, we propose an elegant solution for powerful and robust watermarking of synthetic audio. We theoretically analyze the impact of token errors on watermark detection, and effectively mitigate them using a reduced vocabulary obtained via community detection. Thorough experiments showcase that our gradient-free method can boost detectability by several orders of magnitude, while also achieving built-in robustness to audio modifications. Broadly, we discover a new state-of-the-art for token-level watermarks in multimedia, which simply arises from the nature of discrete representation learning.

A Watermark for Auto-Regressive Image Generation Models

The rapid evolution of image generation models has revolutionized visual content creation, enabling the synthesis of highly realistic and contextually accurate images for diverse applications. However, the potential for misuse, such as deepfake generation, image based phishing attacks, and fabrication of misleading visual evidence, underscores the need for robust authenticity verification mechanisms. While traditional statistical watermarking techniques have proven effective for autoregressive language models, their direct adaptation to image generation models encounters significant challenges due to a phenomenon we term retokenization mismatch, a disparity between original and retokenized sequences during the image generation process. To overcome this limitation, we propose C-reweight, a novel, distortion-free watermarking method explicitly designed for image generation models. By leveraging a clustering-based strategy that treats tokens within the same cluster equivalently, C-reweight mitigates retokenization mismatch while preserving image fidelity. Extensive evaluations on leading image generation platforms reveal that C-reweight not only maintains the visual quality of generated images but also improves detectability over existing distortion-free watermarking techniques, setting a new standard for secure and trustworthy image synthesis.

Neural Text to Articulate Talk: Deep Text to Audiovisual Speech Synthesis achieving both Auditory and Photo-realism

Recent advances in deep learning for sequential data have given rise to fast and powerful models that produce realistic videos of talking humans. The state of the art in talking face generation focuses mainly on lip-syncing, being conditioned on audio clips. However, having the ability to synthesize talking humans from text transcriptions rather than audio is particularly beneficial for many applications and is expected to receive more and more attention, following the recent breakthroughs in large language models. For that, most methods implement a cascaded 2-stage architecture of a text-to-speech module followed by an audio-driven talking face generator, but this ignores the highly complex interplay between audio and visual streams that occurs during speaking. In this paper, we propose the first, to the best of our knowledge, text-driven audiovisual speech synthesizer that uses Transformers and does not follow a cascaded approach. Our method, which we call NEUral Text to ARticulate Talk (NEUTART), is a talking face generator that uses a joint audiovisual feature space, as well as speech-informed 3D facial reconstructions and a lip-reading loss for visual supervision. The proposed model produces photorealistic talking face videos with human-like articulation and well-synced audiovisual streams. Our experiments on audiovisual datasets as well as in-the-wild videos reveal state-of-the-art generation quality both in terms of objective metrics and human evaluation.