Watermarking across Modalities for Content Tracing and Generative AI

Abstract: Watermarking embeds information into digital content like images, audio, or text, imperceptible to humans but robustly detectable by specific algorithms. This technology has important applications in many challenges of the industry such as content moderation, tracing AI-generated content, and monitoring the usage of AI models. The contributions of this thesis include the development of new watermarking techniques for images, audio, and text. We first introduce methods for active moderation of images on social platforms. We then develop specific techniques for AI-generated content. We specifically demonstrate methods to adapt latent generative models to embed watermarks in all generated content, identify watermarked sections in speech, and improve watermarking in LLMs with tests that ensure low false positive rates. Furthermore, we explore the use of digital watermarking to detect model misuse, including the detection of watermarks in LLMs fine-tuned on watermarked text, and introduce training-free watermarks for the weights of large transformers. Through these contributions, the thesis provides effective solutions for the challenges posed by the increasing use of generative AI models and the need for model monitoring and content moderation. It finally examines the challenges and limitations of watermarking techniques and discuss potential future directions for research in this area.