Multi-bit Audio Watermarking

This capability is increasingly critical in the era of social media and rapidly improving generative models, which enable the production and dissemination of highly realistic synthetic audio. Reliable watermarking can help end-users verify the legitimacy of clips, deter unauthorized sampling, and credit creators, while simultaneously raising the stakes for adversaries who seek to remove or forge watermarks. Historically, audio watermarking was largely based on empirical schemes such as Quantization Index Modulation [1], patchwork algorithms [2], least significant bit embedding [3], and spread-spectrum techniques [4]. Although effective in certain settings, these methods often fail under common transformations such as audio compression. The trade-off between watermark imperceptibility and robustness against attacks remains at the center of audio watermarking and motivates our work.