WWW2026
AWMA-MoE: Attention-Guided Watermark Adapter with MoE for Latent Diffusion Models
Yicheng Huang, Xinyu Xiao, Jian Zhang, Shuhan Qi, Yulin Wu, Xuan Wang
Abstract
With the evolving generative models, generated images are closer to reality, raising concerns about information authenticity and malicious misuse. Invisible watermarks offer a practical approach to detecting and tracing them. However, while image watermarking inevitably introduces quality degradation, most existing methods primarily focus on improving watermark robustness. To address this limitation, we propose AWMA-MoE, a framework that enhances the quality of generated images while preserving strong watermark robustness. Specifically, we design an attention-based adapter that adaptively embeds watermarks with spatially varying strengths across image regions. Building upon this, we introduce an MoE architecture that leverages diverse experts to further improve image quality while retaining watermark robustness. Experiments demonstrate that AWMA-MoE can reduce the distortion of generated images and exhibit competitive watermark performance, thus striking an improved balance for watermarking generated image tasks and better linking post-hoc and in-generation methods.