Write Where It Matters: Policy-Guided Watermarks for 3D Gaussian Splatting
Abstract
Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enable photorealistic real-time rendering but also increase the risks of unauthorized copying and redistribution. Existing 3DGS watermarking methods typically rely on handcrafted thresholds or globally fixed hyperparameters to balance invisibility and robustness, making their embedding behavior static and scene-agnostic. We instead formulate 3DGS watermarking as a goal-directed decision process and introduce Write Where It Matters (W2M), the first reinforcement learning-based framework that adaptively learns where and how much to embed. By modeling the embedding process as a Markov Decision Process, W2M uses a lightweight policy network to allocate precise Gaussian updates directly from immediate reward feedback, iteratively. The reward incentivizes both rendering-space invisibility and decoding robustness under various image- and model-level distortions. To achieve efficient control, W2M operates on a structured 3DGS backbone organized around learnable anchors and applies policy-guided per-anchor gradient scaling. Extensive experiments across the Blender, LLFF, and Mip-NeRF 360 datasets demonstrate that W2M achieves state-of-the-art bit accuracy, strong perceptual fidelity, and structural consistency under both standard and adversarial conditions.