# WaTeRFlow: Watermark Temporal Robustness via Flow Consistency

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19048 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19048/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Robustness, privacy and adversarial aspects, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 39 of its 91 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Robustness, privacy and adversarial aspects](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/robustness-privacy-and-adversarial-aspects/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08818/) (2023)
- [Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09794/) (2022)
- [Latent Consistency Models: Synthesizing High-Resolution Images with Few-Step Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04378/) (2023)
- [MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10012/) (2023)
- [HiDDeN: Hiding Data With Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09937/) (2018)
- [The Stable Signature: Rooting Watermarks in Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15435/) (2023)
- [UltraEdit: Instruction-based Fine-Grained Image Editing at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05282/) (2024)
- [StegaStamp: Invisible Hyperlinks in Physical Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05343/) (2019)
- [Robust Invisible Video Watermarking with Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01285/) (2019)
- [Invisible Image Watermarks Are Provably Removable Using Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01953/) (2023)
- [VideoBooth: Diffusion-based Video Generation with Image Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00777/) (2023)
- [Robust Watermarking Using Generative Priors Against Image Editing: From Benchmarking to Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18775/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image watermarking supports authenticity and provenance, yet many schemes are still easy to bypass with various distortions and powerful generative edits. Deep learning-based watermarking has improved robustness to diffusion-based image editing, but a gap remains when a watermarked image is converted to video by image-to-video (I2V), in which per-frame watermark detection weakens. I2V has quickly advanced from short, jittery clips to multi-second, temporally coherent scenes, and it now serves not only content creation but also world-modeling and simulation workflows, making cross-modal watermark recovery crucial. We present WaTeRFlow, a framework tailored for robustness under I2V. It consists of (i) FUSE (Flow-guided Unified Synthesis Engine), which exposes the encoder-decoder to realistic distortions via instruction-driven edits and a fast video diffusion proxy during training, (ii) optical-flow warping with a Temporal Consistency Loss (TCL) that stabilizes per-frame predictions, and (iii) a semantic preservation loss that maintains the conditioning signal. Experiments across representative I2V models show accurate watermark recovery from frames, with higher first-frame and per-frame bit accuracy and resilience when various distortions are applied before or after video generation.