The Forensic Cost of Watermark Removal

arXiv:2604.25491v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current watermark removal methods are evaluated on two axes: attack success rate and perceptual quality. We show this is insufficient. While state-of-the-art attacks successfully degrade the watermark signal without visible distortion, they leave distinct statistical artifacts that betray the removal attempt. We name this overlooked axis Watermark Removal Detection (WRD) and demonstrate that a modern classifier trained on these artifacts achieves