The Orthogonal Vulnerabilities of Generative AI Watermarks: A Comparative Empirical Benchmark of Spatial and Latent Provenance

TL;DR

This study empirically compares spatial and latent AI watermarks, revealing their mutually exclusive vulnerabilities and highlighting the need for multi-domain approaches to improve digital provenance robustness.

Contribution

It introduces an empirical benchmark and the AER framework to evaluate and compare the vulnerabilities of spatial and latent watermarks against modern adversarial attacks.

Findings

Spatial watermarks are highly vulnerable to pixel-rewriting attacks.

Latent watermarks are fragile against geometric misalignments.

Single-domain watermarks are insufficient for robust digital provenance.

Abstract

As open-weights generative AI rapidly proliferates, the ability to synthesize hyper-realistic media has introduced profound challenges to digital trust. Automated disinformation and AI-generated imagery have made robust digital provenance a critical cybersecurity imperative. Currently, state-of-the-art invisible watermarks operate within one of two primary mathematical manifolds: the spatial domain (post-generation pixel embedding) or the latent domain (pre-generation frequency embedding). While existing literature frequently evaluates these models against isolated, classical distortions, there is a critical lack of rigorous, comparative benchmarking against modern generative AI editing tools. In this study, we empirically evaluate two leading representative paradigms, RivaGAN (Spatial) and Tree-Ring (Latent), utilizing an automated Attack Simulation Engine across 30 intensity intervals of geometric and generative perturbations. We formalize an "Adversarial Evasion Region" (AER) framework to measure cryptographic degradation against semantic visual retention (OpenCLIP > 75.0). Our statistical analysis ($n=100$ per interval, $MOE = \pm 3.92\%$) reveals that these domains possess mutually exclusive, mathematically orthogonal vulnerabilities. Spatial watermarks experience severe cryptographic degradation under algorithmic pixel-rewriting (exhibiting a 67.47% AER evasion rate under Img2Img translation), whereas latent watermarks exhibit profound fragility against geometric misalignment (yielding a 43.20% AER evasion rate under static cropping). By proving that single-domain watermarking is fundamentally insufficient against modern adversarial toolsets, this research exposes a systemic vulnerability in current digital provenance standards and establishes the foundational exigence for future multi-domain cryptographic architectures.