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Kejiang Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Kejiang Chen.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

WMVLM: Evaluating Diffusion Model Image Watermarking via Vision-Language Models

Digital watermarking is essential for securing generated images from diffusion models. Accurate watermark evaluation is critical for algorithm development, yet existing methods have significant limitations: they lack a unified framework for both residual and semantic watermarks, provide results without interpretability, neglect comprehensive security considerations, and often use inappropriate metrics for semantic watermarks. To address these gaps, we propose WMVLM, the first unified and interpretable evaluation framework for diffusion model image watermarking via vision-language models (VLMs). We redefine quality and security metrics for each watermark type: residual watermarks are evaluated by artifact strength and erasure resistance, while semantic watermarks are assessed through latent distribution shifts. Moreover, we introduce a three-stage training strategy to progressively enable the model to achieve classification, scoring, and interpretable text generation. Experiments show WMVLM outperforms state-of-the-art VLMs with strong generalization across datasets, diffusion models, and watermarking methods.

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AEDR: Training-Free AI-Generated Image Attribution via Autoencoder Double-Reconstruction

The rapid advancement of image-generation technologies has made it possible for anyone to create photorealistic images using generative models, raising significant security concerns. To mitigate malicious use, tracing the origin of such images is essential. Reconstruction-based attribution methods offer a promising solution, but they often suffer from reduced accuracy and high computational costs when applied to state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. To address these challenges, we propose AEDR (AutoEncoder Double-Reconstruction), a novel training-free attribution method designed for generative models with continuous autoencoders. Unlike existing reconstruction-based approaches that rely on the value of a single reconstruction loss, AEDR performs two consecutive reconstructions using the model's autoencoder, and adopts the ratio of these two reconstruction losses as the attribution signal. This signal is further calibrated using the image homogeneity metric to improve accuracy, which inherently cancels out absolute biases caused by image complexity, with autoencoder-based reconstruction ensuring superior computational efficiency. Experiments on eight top latent diffusion models show that AEDR achieves 25.5% higher attribution accuracy than existing reconstruction-based methods, while requiring only 1% of the computational time.

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SemBind: Binding Diffusion Watermarks to Semantics Against Black-Box Forgery Attacks

Latent-based watermarks, integrated into the generation process of latent diffusion models (LDMs), simplify detection and attribution of generated images. However, recent black-box forgery attacks, where an attacker needs at least one watermarked image and black-box access to the provider's model, can embed the provider's watermark into images not produced by the provider, posing outsized risk to provenance and trust. We propose SemBind, the first defense framework for latent-based watermarks that resists black-box forgery by binding latent signals to image semantics via a learned semantic masker. Trained with contrastive learning, the masker yields near-invariant codes for the same prompt and near-orthogonal codes across prompts; these codes are reshaped and permuted to modulate the target latent before any standard latent-based watermark. SemBind is generally compatible with existing latent-based watermarking schemes and keeps image quality essentially unchanged, while a simple mask-ratio parameter offers a tunable trade-off between anti-forgery strength and robustness. Across four mainstream latent-based watermark methods, our SemBind-enabled anti-forgery variants markedly reduce false acceptance under black-box forgery while providing a controllable robustness-security balance.

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STEAD: Robust Provably Secure Linguistic Steganography with Diffusion Language Model

Recent provably secure linguistic steganography (PSLS) methods rely on mainstream autoregressive language models (ARMs) to address historically challenging tasks, that is, to disguise covert communication as ``innocuous'' natural language communication. However, due to the characteristic of sequential generation of ARMs, the stegotext generated by ARM-based PSLS methods will produce serious error propagation once it changes, making existing methods unavailable under an active tampering attack. To address this, we propose a robust, provably secure linguistic steganography with diffusion language models (DLMs). Unlike ARMs, DLMs can generate text in a partially parallel manner, allowing us to find robust positions for steganographic embedding that can be combined with error-correcting codes. Furthermore, we introduce error correction strategies, including pseudo-random error correction and neighborhood search correction, during steganographic extraction. Theoretical proof and experimental results demonstrate that our method is secure and robust. It can resist token ambiguity in stegotext segmentation and, to some extent, withstand token-level attacks of insertion, deletion, and substitution.

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LiveSecBench: A Dynamic and Event-Driven Safety Benchmark for Chinese Language Model Applications

We introduce LiveSecBench, a continuously updated safety benchmark specifically for Chinese-language LLM application scenarios. LiveSecBench constructs a high-quality and unique dataset through a pipeline that combines automated generation with human verification. By periodically releasing new versions to expand the dataset and update evaluation metrics, LiveSecBench provides a robust and up-to-date standard for AI safety. In this report, we introduce our second release v251215, which evaluates across five dimensions (Public Safety, Fairness & Bias, Privacy, Truthfulness, and Mental Health Safety.) We evaluate 57 representative LLMs using an ELO rating system, offering a leaderboard of the current state of Chinese LLM safety. The result is available at https://livesecbench.intokentech.cn/.

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AuthenLoRA: Entangling Stylization with Imperceptible Watermarks for Copyright-Secure LoRA Adapters

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) offers an efficient paradigm for customizing diffusion models, but its ease of redistribution raises concerns over unauthorized use and the generation of untraceable content. Existing watermarking techniques either target base models or verify LoRA modules themselves, yet they fail to propagate watermarks to generated images, leaving a critical gap in traceability. Moreover, traceability watermarking designed for base models is not tightly coupled with stylization and often introduces visual degradation or high false-positive detection rates. To address these limitations, we propose AuthenLoRA, a unified watermarking framework that embeds imperceptible, traceable watermarks directly into the LoRA training process while preserving stylization quality. AuthenLoRA employs a dual-objective optimization strategy that jointly learns the target style distribution and the watermark-induced distribution shift, ensuring that any image generated with the watermarked LoRA reliably carries the watermark. We further design an expanded LoRA architecture for enhanced multi-scale adaptation and introduce a zero-message regularization mechanism that substantially reduces false positives during watermark verification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AuthenLoRA achieves high-fidelity stylization, robust watermark propagation, and significantly lower false-positive rates compared with existing approaches. Open-source implementation is available at: https://github.com/ShiFangming0823/AuthenLoRA

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LiteUpdate: A Lightweight Framework for Updating AI-Generated Image Detectors

The rapid progress of generative AI has led to the emergence of new generative models, while existing detection methods struggle to keep pace, resulting in significant degradation in the detection performance. This highlights the urgent need for continuously updating AI-generated image detectors to adapt to new generators. To overcome low efficiency and catastrophic forgetting in detector updates, we propose LiteUpdate, a lightweight framework for updating AI-generated image detectors. LiteUpdate employs a representative sample selection module that leverages image confidence and gradient-based discriminative features to precisely select boundary samples. This approach improves learning and detection accuracy on new distributions with limited generated images, significantly enhancing detector update efficiency. Additionally, LiteUpdate incorporates a model merging module that fuses weights from multiple fine-tuning trajectories, including pre-trained, representative, and random updates. This balances the adaptability to new generators and mitigates the catastrophic forgetting of prior knowledge. Experiments demonstrate that LiteUpdate substantially boosts detection performance in various detectors. Specifically, on AIDE, the average detection accuracy on Midjourney improved from 87.63% to 93.03%, a 6.16% relative increase.

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A high-capacity linguistic steganography based on entropy-driven rank-token mapping

Linguistic steganography enables covert communication through embedding secret messages into innocuous texts; however, current methods face critical limitations in payload capacity and security. Traditional modification-based methods introduce detectable anomalies, while retrieval-based strategies suffer from low embedding capacity. Modern generative steganography leverages language models to generate natural stego text but struggles with limited entropy in token predictions, further constraining capacity. To address these issues, we propose an entropy-driven framework called RTMStega that integrates rank-based adaptive coding and context-aware decompression with normalized entropy. By mapping secret messages to token probability ranks and dynamically adjusting sampling via context-aware entropy-based adjustments, RTMStega achieves a balance between payload capacity and imperceptibility. Experiments across diverse datasets and models demonstrate that RTMStega triples the payload capacity of mainstream generative steganography, reduces processing time by over 50%, and maintains high text quality, offering a trustworthy solution for secure and efficient covert communication.

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T2SMark: Balancing Robustness and Diversity in Noise-as-Watermark for Diffusion Models

Diffusion models have advanced rapidly in recent years, producing high-fidelity images while raising concerns about intellectual property protection and the misuse of generative AI. Image watermarking for diffusion models, particularly Noise-as-Watermark (NaW) methods, encode watermark as specific standard Gaussian noise vector for image generation, embedding the infomation seamlessly while maintaining image quality. For detection, the generation process is inverted to recover the initial noise vector containing the watermark before extraction. However, existing NaW methods struggle to balance watermark robustness with generation diversity. Some methods achieve strong robustness by heavily constraining initial noise sampling, which degrades user experience, while others preserve diversity but prove too fragile for real-world deployment. To address this issue, we propose T2SMark, a two-stage watermarking scheme based on Tail-Truncated Sampling (TTS). Unlike prior methods that simply map bits to positive or negative values, TTS enhances robustness by embedding bits exclusively in the reliable tail regions while randomly sampling the central zone to preserve the latent distribution. Our two-stage framework then ensures sampling diversity by integrating a randomly generated session key into both encryption pipelines. We evaluate T2SMark on diffusion models with both U-Net and DiT backbones. Extensive experiments show that it achieves an optimal balance between robustness and diversity. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/0xD009/T2SMark}{https://github.com/0xD009/T2SMark}.

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EditMark: Watermarking Large Language Models based on Model Editing

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but their training requires extensive data and computational resources, rendering them valuable digital assets. Therefore, it is essential to watermark LLMs to protect their copyright and trace unauthorized use or resale. Existing methods for watermarking LLMs primarily rely on training LLMs with a watermarked dataset, which entails burdensome training costs and negatively impacts the LLM's performance. In addition, their watermarked texts are not logical or natural, thereby reducing the stealthiness of the watermark. To address these issues, we propose EditMark, the first watermarking method that leverages model editing to embed a training-free, stealthy, and performance-lossless watermark for LLMs. We observe that some questions have multiple correct answers. Therefore, we assign each answer a unique watermark and update the weights of LLMs to generate corresponding questions and answers through the model editing technique. In addition, we refine the model editing technique to align with the requirements of watermark embedding. Specifically, we introduce an adaptive multi-round stable editing strategy, coupled with the injection of a noise matrix, to improve both the effectiveness and robustness of the watermark embedding. Extensive experiments indicate that EditMark can embed 32-bit watermarks into LLMs within 20 seconds (Fine-tuning: 6875 seconds) with a watermark extraction success rate of 100%, which demonstrates its effectiveness and efficiency. External experiments further demonstrate that EditMark has fidelity, stealthiness, and a certain degree of robustness against common attacks.

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WavInWav: Time-domain Speech Hiding via Invertible Neural Network

Data hiding is essential for secure communication across digital media, and recent advances in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) provide enhanced methods for embedding secret information effectively. However, previous audio hiding methods often result in unsatisfactory quality when recovering secret audio, due to their inherent limitations in the modeling of time-frequency relationships. In this paper, we explore these limitations and introduce a new DNN-based approach. We use a flow-based invertible neural network to establish a direct link between stego audio, cover audio, and secret audio, enhancing the reversibility of embedding and extracting messages. To address common issues from time-frequency transformations that degrade secret audio quality during recovery, we implement a time-frequency loss on the time-domain signal. This approach not only retains the benefits of time-frequency constraints but also enhances the reversibility of message recovery, which is vital for practical applications. We also add an encryption technique to protect the hidden data from unauthorized access. Experimental results on the VCTK and LibriSpeech datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms previous approaches in terms of subjective and objective metrics and exhibits robustness to various types of noise, suggesting its utility in targeted secure communication scenarios.

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PSRT: Accelerating LRM-based Guard Models via Prefilled Safe Reasoning Traces

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on tasks such as mathematics and code generation. Motivated by these strengths, recent work has empirically demonstrated the effectiveness of LRMs as guard models in improving harmful query detection. However, LRMs typically generate long reasoning traces during inference, causing substantial computational overhead. In this paper, we introduce PSRT, a method that replaces the model's reasoning process with a Prefilled Safe Reasoning Trace, thereby significantly reducing the inference cost of LRMs. Concretely, PSRT prefills "safe reasoning virtual tokens" from a constructed dataset and learns over their continuous embeddings. With the aid of indicator tokens, PSRT enables harmful-query detection in a single forward pass while preserving the classification effectiveness of LRMs. We evaluate PSRT on 7 models, 13 datasets, and 8 jailbreak methods. In terms of efficiency, PSRT completely removes the overhead of generating reasoning tokens during inference. In terms of classification performance, PSRT achieves nearly identical accuracy, with only a minor average F1 drop of 0.015 across 7 models and 5 datasets.

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Multimodal Prompt Decoupling Attack on the Safety Filters in Text-to-Image Models

Text-to-image (T2I) models have been widely applied in generating high-fidelity images across various domains. However, these models may also be abused to produce Not-Safe-for-Work (NSFW) content via jailbreak attacks. Existing jailbreak methods primarily manipulate the textual prompt, leaving potential vulnerabilities in image-based inputs largely unexplored. Moreover, text-based methods face challenges in bypassing the model's safety filters. In response to these limitations, we propose the Multimodal Prompt Decoupling Attack (MPDA), which utilizes image modality to separate the harmful semantic components of the original unsafe prompt. MPDA follows three core steps: firstly, a large language model (LLM) decouples unsafe prompts into pseudo-safe prompts and harmful prompts. The former are seemingly harmless sub-prompts that can bypass filters, while the latter are sub-prompts with unsafe semantics that trigger filters. Subsequently, the LLM rewrites the harmful prompts into natural adversarial prompts to bypass safety filters, which guide the T2I model to modify the base image into an NSFW output. Finally, to ensure semantic consistency between the generated NSFW images and the original unsafe prompts, the visual language model generates image captions, providing a new pathway to guide the LLM in iterative rewriting and refining the generated content.

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A Closer Look at Machine Unlearning for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) may memorize sensitive or copyrighted content, raising privacy and legal concerns. Due to the high cost of retraining from scratch, researchers attempt to employ machine unlearning to remove specific content from LLMs while preserving the overall performance. In this paper, we discuss several issues in machine unlearning for LLMs and provide our insights on possible approaches. To address the issue of inadequate evaluation of model outputs after unlearning, we introduce three additional metrics to evaluate token diversity, sentence semantics, and factual correctness. We then categorize unlearning methods into untargeted and targeted, and discuss their issues respectively. Specifically, the behavior that untargeted unlearning attempts to approximate is unpredictable and may involve hallucinations, and existing regularization is insufficient for targeted unlearning. To alleviate these issues, we propose using the objective of maximizing entropy (ME) for untargeted unlearning and incorporate answer preservation (AP) loss as regularization for targeted unlearning. Experimental results across three scenarios, i.e., fictitious unlearning, continual unlearning, and real-world unlearning, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/closer-look-LLM-unlearning.

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De-AntiFake: Rethinking the Protective Perturbations Against Voice Cloning Attacks

The rapid advancement of speech generation models has heightened privacy and security concerns related to voice cloning (VC). Recent studies have investigated disrupting unauthorized voice cloning by introducing adversarial perturbations. However, determined attackers can mitigate these protective perturbations and successfully execute VC. In this study, we conduct the first systematic evaluation of these protective perturbations against VC under realistic threat models that include perturbation purification. Our findings reveal that while existing purification methods can neutralize a considerable portion of the protective perturbations, they still lead to distortions in the feature space of VC models, which degrades the performance of VC. From this perspective, we propose a novel two-stage purification method: (1) Purify the perturbed speech; (2) Refine it using phoneme guidance to align it with the clean speech distribution. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art purification methods in disrupting VC defenses. Our study reveals the limitations of adversarial perturbation-based VC defenses and underscores the urgent need for more robust solutions to mitigate the security and privacy risks posed by VC. The code and audio samples are available at https://de-antifake.github.io.

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M3-AGIQA: Multimodal, Multi-Round, Multi-Aspect AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment

The rapid advancement of AI-generated image (AIGI) models presents new challenges for evaluating image quality, particularly across three aspects: perceptual quality, prompt correspondence, and authenticity. To address these challenges, we introduce M3-AGIQA, a comprehensive framework that leverages Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to enable more human-aligned, holistic evaluation of AI-generated images across both visual and textual domains. Besides, our framework features a structured multi-round evaluation process, generating and analyzing intermediate image descriptions to provide deeper insight into these three aspects. By aligning model outputs more closely with human judgment, M3-AGIQA delivers robust and interpretable quality scores. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on tested datasets and aspects, and exhibits strong generalizability in most cross-dataset settings. Code is available at https://github.com/strawhatboy/M3-AGIQA.

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SQL Injection Jailbreak: A Structural Disaster of Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to jailbreak attacks that can induce them to generate harmful content. Previous jailbreak methods primarily exploited the internal properties or capabilities of LLMs, such as optimization-based jailbreak methods and methods that leveraged the model's context-learning abilities. In this paper, we introduce a novel jailbreak method, SQL Injection Jailbreak (SIJ), which targets the external properties of LLMs, specifically, the way LLMs construct input prompts. By injecting jailbreak information into user prompts, SIJ successfully induces the model to output harmful content. For open-source models, SIJ achieves near 100% attack success rates on five well-known LLMs on the AdvBench and HEx-PHI, while incurring lower time costs compared to previous methods. For closed-source models, SIJ achieves an average attack success rate over 85% across five models in the GPT and Doubao series. Additionally, SIJ exposes a new vulnerability in LLMs that urgently requires mitigation. To address this, we propose a simple adaptive defense method called Self-Reminder-Key to counter SIJ and demonstrate its effectiveness through experimental results. Our code is available at https://github.com/weiyezhimeng/SQL-Injection-Jailbreak.

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Gaussian Shading++: Rethinking the Realistic Deployment Challenge of Performance-Lossless Image Watermark for Diffusion Models

Ethical concerns surrounding copyright protection and inappropriate content generation pose challenges for the practical implementation of diffusion models. One effective solution involves watermarking the generated images. Existing methods primarily focus on ensuring that watermark embedding does not degrade the model performance. However, they often overlook critical challenges in real-world deployment scenarios, such as the complexity of watermark key management, user-defined generation parameters, and the difficulty of verification by arbitrary third parties. To address this issue, we propose Gaussian Shading++, a diffusion model watermarking method tailored for real-world deployment. We propose a double-channel design that leverages pseudorandom error-correcting codes to encode the random seed required for watermark pseudorandomization, achieving performance-lossless watermarking under a fixed watermark key and overcoming key management challenges. Additionally, we model the distortions introduced during generation and inversion as an additive white Gaussian noise channel and employ a novel soft decision decoding strategy during extraction, ensuring strong robustness even when generation parameters vary. To enable third-party verification, we incorporate public key signatures, which provide a certain level of resistance against forgery attacks even when model inversion capabilities are fully disclosed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Gaussian Shading++ not only maintains performance losslessness but also outperforms existing methods in terms of robustness, making it a more practical solution for real-world deployment.

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