AI & ML
ProxyEraseAgent: Blind Watermark Removal in the Wild
arXiv cs.CR0 views
arXiv:2610.11290v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Invisible image watermark removal has received growing attention. Despite substantial progress, existing attacks face a tension between practicality and specificity. Attacks exploiting detector outputs, decoder responses, or paired images can be tailored to the watermark decision boundary, but require information rarely available in realistic scenarios. Conversely, attacks based on compression, geometric distortion, or reconstruction are easily deployed from a single watermarked image, but remain largely open-loop: they apply generic transformations without knowing if the image is moving toward watermark failure. Thus, the key challenge in single-image blind watermark removal is not merely how to transform the image, but how to obtain a useful removal direction without accessing the hidden decoder. To bridge this gap, we propose ProxyEraseAgent, an agent-driven framework recovering attack specificity through proxy decoder responses. Publicly available watermarking schemes provide a natural knowledge base of candidate decoders, where some are informative for a given unknown image. Our insight is that a decoder producing a strong calibrated response to the query image likely shares a nearby decoding boundary with the hidden target mechanism. ProxyEraseAgent ranks these decoders by calibrated response strength and uses the top ones as proxy boundary estimators. Their responses then guide a progressive search over heterogeneous removal operations (e.g., geometric distortion, JPEG compression, image reconstruction, and gradient perturbation) under perceptual-quality constraints. Experiments across 11 watermarking systems show ProxyEraseAgent achieves a 94.8% attack success rate, demonstrating the effectiveness of response-guided proxy retrieval and feedback-driven sequential planning for blind watermark removal.
Source:https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11290PreviousProvable Subexponential Algorithms for NIST Third-Round Lattice FamiliesNextMORDOR:Mitigating Overheads of Read Disturbance Preventive Operations via Elastic Refresh Scheduling
Related posts

10 Open-Source Robotics Repositories for 3D Perception, VLA Policies, and Sensor Calibration
0dev.to
My self-modifying system tried to wire a gate-passing module into its own protection enforcer. It was refused three times.
0dev.to
Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse
0Hacker News
The Card-Update Page Gets One Visit. Design for That Visit.
0dev.to UX
SaaS Partner Scout: A Script for Identifying GitHub SaaS Project Contributors
0dev.to GitHub
WARN Act and Retaliation — Can Your Employer Punish You for Asking About a Layoff Notice?
0dev.to Data