Watermark-embedded Adversarial Examples for Copyright Protection against
  Diffusion Models
Peifei Zhu Tsubasa Takahashi Hirokatsu Kataoka
Diffusion Models (DMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various
image-generation tasks. However, there are growing concerns that DMs could be
used to imitate unauthorized creations and thus raise copyright issues. To
address this issue, we propose a novel framework that embeds personal
watermarks in the generation of adversarial examples. Such examples can force
DMs to generate images with visible watermarks and prevent DMs from imitating
unauthorized images. We construct a generator based on conditional adversarial
networks and design three losses (adversarial loss, GAN loss, and perturbation
loss) to generate adversarial examples that have subtle perturbation but can
effectively attack DMs to prevent copyright violations. Training a generator
for a personal watermark by our method only requires 5-10 samples within 2-3
minutes, and once the generator is trained, it can generate adversarial
examples with that watermark significantly fast (0.2s per image). We conduct
extensive experiments in various conditional image-generation scenarios.
Compared to existing methods that generate images with chaotic textures, our
method adds visible watermarks on the generated images, which is a more
straightforward way to indicate copyright violations. We also observe that our
adversarial examples exhibit good transferability across unknown generative
models. Therefore, this work provides a simple yet powerful way to protect
copyright from DM-based imitation.