MaxMark: High-Capacity Diffusion-Native Watermarking via Robust and Invertible Latent Embedding
Abstract
Diffusion-native watermarking provides a more secure and reliable way to trace images from latent diffusion models (LDMs) by embedding information directly into the generative process. However, existing methods suffer from a fundamental limitation: their embedding capacity is extremely small. We introduce MaxMark, a high-capacity watermarking framework that supports embed rich watermark messages into generated images. MaxMark uses two components: a robust watermark embedding module that enhance the secret message and places them into reliable regions of the latent noise, and a distribution transformation module that maps the watermarked latent back to an approximate Gaussian, ensuring compatibility with the diffusion process and preserving image fidelity. The distribution transformation is implemented with an invertible neural network (INN), whose exactly reversible structure enables precise recovery and efficient training. Experiments show that MaxMark surpasses prior methods in capacity, robustness, and imperceptibility, achieving up to a 46\% improvement in bit accuracy for large watermark payloads.