# StyleSentinel: Reliable Artistic Copyright Verification via Stylistic Fingerprints

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01335 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01335/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 13 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)
- LLM safety and security / [Watermarking generated content and models](https://mlsanity.com/safety/watermarking-generated-content-and-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Art or Digital Forgery? Investigating Data Replication in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03860/) (2022)
- [Kandinsky: an Improved Text-to-Image Synthesis with Image Prior and Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03502/) (2023)
- [Can Protective Perturbation Safeguard Personal Data from Being Exploited by Stable Diffusion?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00084/) (2023)
- [IMPRESS: Evaluating the Resilience of Imperceptible Perturbations Against Unauthorized Data Usage in Diffusion-Based Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19248/) (2023)
- [EditShield: Protecting Unauthorized Image Editing by Instruction-guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12066/) (2023)
- [Generative Watermarking Against Unauthorized Subject-Driven Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07754/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Artistic Copyright Infringements in the Era of Text-to-Image Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08030/) (2024)
- [ArtistAuditor: Auditing Artist Style Pirate in Text-to-Image Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13061/) (2025)
- [Alteration-free and Model-agnostic Origin Attribution of Generated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18439/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [The Silent Brush: Evaluating Artistic Style Leakage in AI Art Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17500/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The versatility of diffusion models in generating customized images has led to unauthorized usage of personal artwork, which poses a significant threat to the intellectual property of artists. Existing approaches relying on embedding additional information, such as perturbations, watermarks, and backdoors, suffer from limited defensive capabilities and fail to protect artwork published online. In this paper, we propose StyleSentinel, an approach for copyright protection of artwork by verifying an inherent stylistic fingerprint in the artist's artwork. Specifically, we employ a semantic self-reconstruction process to enhance stylistic expressiveness within the artwork, which establishes a dense and style-consistent manifold foundation for feature learning. Subsequently, we adaptively fuse multi-layer image features to encode abstract artistic style into a compact stylistic fingerprint. Finally, we model the target artist's style as a minimal enclosing hypersphere boundary in the feature space, transforming complex copyright verification into a robust one-class learning task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that compared with the state-of-the-art, StyleSentinel achieves superior performance on the one-sample verification task. We also demonstrate the effectiveness through online platforms.