[Submitted on 21 Oct 2026]
Title:FiLM-CAM: Keyed Feature Modulation for Conditional-Access Watermarking
View a PDF of the paper titled FiLM-CAM: Keyed Feature Modulation for Conditional-Access Watermarking, by Yash Kulthe and 4 other authors
View PDF HTML (experimental)
Abstract:We propose FiLM-CAM; a conditional-access image watermarking approach that enforces authorized encoding, decoding, and removal through keyed feature modulation. A secret key conditions a Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) mechanism that transforms the internal representation of the watermark signal before embedding, thereby coupling the payload to the key at the feature, rather than pixel level. The same key must be presented to condition the decoder to correctly recover the payload embedded in an image. To enforce conditional access, we train the system to maximize the performance gap between authorized and unauthorized use, ensuring reliable extraction under the correct key while inducing failure under incorrect keys. In addition, we design our encoder to estimate the watermark residual invariant to the presence of pre-existing watermarks. This design enables conditional watermark removal via simple re-encoding and subtraction of the residual using iterative refinement, contingent on knowledge of the secret key. We evaluate FiLM-CAM across multiple watermarking encoder-decoder backbones, demonstrating that keyed feature modulation serves as an effective, architecture-agnostic conditional access module (CAM) for image watermarking.
Comments: Accepted to NeurIPS 2026
Subjects:
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2610.30347 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2610.30347v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.30347
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Yash Kulthe [view email] [v1] Wed, 21 Oct 2026 19:06:56 UTC (20,119 KB)
Full-text links:
Access Paper:
View a PDF of the paper titled FiLM-CAM: Keyed Feature Modulation for Conditional-Access Watermarking, by Yash Kulthe and 4 other authors
View PDF
HTML (experimental)
TeX Source
view license
Additional Features
Audio Summary
Current browse context:
cs.CV
new | recent | 2026-10
Change to browse by:
cs
References & Citations
SciX
Google Scholar
Semantic Scholar
Loading...
Data provided by:
Bibliographic Tools
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data, Media
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos
Demos
Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Related Papers
Recommenders and Search Tools
Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
Author
Venue
Institution
Topic
About arXivLabs
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)