Files
remove-ai-watermarks/docs/external-benchmark-licensing.md
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Victor KuznetsovandClaude Opus 5.5 7ba07869d2 Add paid-service captures, aggregator attribution, and provenance vetoes
Collect provider samples from Higgsfield, Runway and Dreamina plus Google
Photos, Gemini, Grok and YouTube re-encodes into data/captures/2026-09 with
a hash-checked manifest, and use them to fix attribution and false positives:

- Attribute aggregator outputs: Higgsfield job metadata, Dreamina's
  re-signed manifests, Runway's own C2PA signer, TC260 video producers.
- Veto any visible video mark when a valid C2PA claim names another vendor
  (a Gemini Omni clip read as Sora on steam), and gate Kling and Hailuo
  matches on edge, anchor and white-label evidence.
- Veto the Gemini sparkle when trusted provenance names another vendor.
- Report SynthID as present for Google Photos AI edits: Google's checker
  found it on all four measured edits, though manifests record no action.
- Add Vidu video and Wan image marks, TC260 audio placements, and record
  the AIGC key in metadata records.
- Document the research sweep, the Dreamina badge decision, and verified
  Google statements on SynthID in Photos.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-26 14:32:53 -07:00

4.0 KiB

External watermark benchmarks: ETI and W-Bench licensing verdict

Investigation completed 2026-09-07 against the primary sources, closing the last open item of the original research map: whether an honest external benchmark profile can be built on ETI or W-Bench. The verdict is split: W-Bench is legally usable, ETI is license-blocked.

ETI (NeurIPS 2024 "Erasing the Invisible")

Sources verified: the Hugging Face dataset furonghuang-lab/ETI_Competition_Data at revision d80024580b5a and the organizers' evaluation repository erasinginvisible/eval-program.

  • License: absent everywhere. The dataset carries no license tag and no license section in its card; the evaluation repository has no LICENSE file. With no grant of rights, the corpus is unusable in this public repository, and downloading it for local evaluation builds results that cannot be published. The only unblock is written permission from the organizers - an external action that needs an explicit decision, not a default.
  • Composition (verified from the card): 300 Beige-track images (Gaussian Shading on Stable Diffusion 2.1, StegaStamp on Flux.1) and 300 Black-track images (JigMark, PRC, StableSignature, Trufo, plus Gaussian-Shading+JigMark and StableSignature+StegaStamp doubles), plus ~1,072 Beige and ~1,650 Black valid submissions with per-watermark detection results, image-quality metrics, and final scores.
  • One earlier blocker is now stale: the attacked submission images ARE part of the release per the card note, not missing. The license blocker alone remains decisive.

W-Bench / VINE (ICLR 2025)

Sources verified: the Hugging Face dataset Shilin-LU/W-Bench at revision c81f3924f0fb and the VINE repository Shilin-LU/VINE.

  • Dataset license: MIT, declared on the dataset card. The benchmark is legally usable as a benchmark, but the MIT tag does not relicense the underlying COCO, Flickr and ShareGPT4V images, whose own terms still apply to any redistribution.
  • Composition (verified from the card): 10,000 instances sourced from COCO, Flickr, ShareGPT4V and similar datasets, eleven watermarking methods, evaluated across four editing profiles - regeneration, global editing, local editing, image-to-video - plus image distortions. An earlier internal note said "15k images"; the card says 10,000, and the card wins.
  • Code license: NTUITIVE Non-Commercial (NTU technology transfer; commercial use requires contacting the authors). The VINE code cannot be vendored into this Apache-2.0-licensed project, and pipeline outputs derived from running it would inherit that restriction. What remains lawful and useful: consuming the MIT dataset directly with our own pinned oracles and benchmark kernel, adopting the attack taxonomy as protocol definitions reimplemented in our stack.

Verdict for the map item

An external W-Bench profile is buildable: MIT dataset, our kernel, our oracles, no VINE code. Whether to build it is a scoping decision, not a legal one - the image cohorts already cover detection/removal/fidelity questions with pinned local evidence, and W-Bench would add its editing-profile attack axis (regeneration, image-to-video). The ETI profile stays closed until the organizers grant a license; nothing in this repository should download or derive from it meanwhile.

One protocol detail is worth keeping as a candidate, not a commitment: the ETI scoring program runs submissions through median blur and JPEG compression before decoding, so an attack only wins if the watermark stays dead under ordinary handling - that filter separates fragile adversarial-perturbation removals from structural ones. Our removal paths are structural (fill, regeneration), so no driving question exists today; if removal durability under platform re-encoding ever becomes one, the follow-up is an hour-sized handling arm over removed-state artifacts in the existing cohorts. Participant attack code was never published (the release carries attacked images and metrics only), so there is no implementation to learn from even where reading would be lawful.