XAttnMark: Learning Robust Audio Watermarking with Cross-Attention

arXiv:2502.04230v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: The rapid proliferation of generative audio synthesis and editing technologies has raised serious concerns about copyright infringement, data provenance, and the spread of misinformation via deepfake audio. Watermarking offers a proactive solution by embedding imperceptible yet identifiable and traceable signals into audio content. While recent neural network-based watermarking methods like WavMark and AudioSeal have improved robustness and quality, they struggle to jointly optimize both robust detection and accurate attribution. This paper introduces Cross-Attention Robust Audio Watermark (XATTNMARK), which bridges this gap by leveraging partial parameter sharing between the generator and the detector, a cross-attention mechanism for efficient message retrieval, and a temporal conditioning module for improved message distribution. Additionally, we propose a psychoacoustic-aligned time-frequency (TF) masking loss that captures fine-grained auditory masking effects, improving watermark imperceptibility. XATTNMARK achieves state-of-the-art performance in both detection and attribution, demonstrating superior robustness against a wide range of audio transformations, including challenging generative editing at varying strengths. This work advances audio watermarking for protecting intellectual property and ensuring authenticity in the era of generative AI.