X-ModalProof: A Real-Time Interpretable Ownership Verification Scheme for Multimodal AI Models

X-ModalProof is an open-source watermark verification framework for multimodal and edge-deployed AI models, providing real-time, interpretable ownership verification capabilities that support modalities like text. Its core features include interpretability (verification results come with human-understandable evidence), reserved space for multimodal expansion, and lightweight optimization for edge devices. It aims to solve the problem of AI model theft and provide technical support for intellectual property protection.

With the rapid development of large language models and multimodal AI systems, model theft and unauthorized copying have become major challenges for the industry. Traditional copyright methods struggle to address the uniqueness of AI models—weights are easy to copy, but training costs are high (millions of dollars). Therefore, model watermarking technology has become a key means to protect AI intellectual property rights.

Deterministic Training Pipeline

Adopts strict configuration management and random seed control to ensure experimental reproducibility, saves configuration snapshots, signature vectors, and threshold parameters to provide a basis for verification and auditing.

Signature Construction and Threshold Selection

The core mechanism is to construct a unique model signature vector and verify it via cosine similarity; the system automatically selects the optimal threshold to balance false positive and false negative rates, and the signature and threshold are stored persistently to support offline verification.

Multimodal Support Architecture

Currently focused on text modality, but the architecture reserves expansion interfaces for images and multimodal modalities, and its modular design facilitates adding new modalities.

Edge Deployment Optimization

Focuses on lightweight and low latency; the verification process can be executed quickly in resource-constrained environments to meet real-time requirements.

Current Implementation Scope

Completed the first reproducible path: text modality watermark training and verification cycle, complete process of signature construction/threshold selection/cosine verification, three modes (smoke test/debug/full), reproducibility logs and hypothesis tracking mechanism; scaffolding for image and multimodal modules has been built and awaits expansion.

Operation Modes and Configuration

• Smoke test: Quickly verify code correctness using a minimal dataset
• Debug mode: Medium-scale operation for development and troubleshooting
• Full mode: Paper-level experiments that take a long time Users adjust parameters via YAML configuration, and all configuration snapshots are saved to ensure reproducibility.

Experimental Results

Includes frozen reference result files (results/paper_results.json) that record key paper metrics; scripts are used to generate charts instead of re-running full experiments, and missing values are left empty to reflect academic integrity.

Code Structure

Layered architecture: configs/ (YAML configurations), src/ (core code), scripts/ (training and evaluation), tests/ (unit tests), docs/ (documentation), outputs/ (outputs), data/ (data).

Development Workflow

Supports containerized operation; virtual environment isolation is recommended; pytest is used for testing; GitHub Actions supports continuous integration.

Interpretability Innovation

Traditional watermarking is a black-box judgment; X-ModalProof's interpretability design provides a basis for verification results, making it more persuasive in legal evidence and audit scenarios.

Multimodal Expansion Potential

The architecture reserves space to add support for modalities like images and audio, adapting to the popularization needs of multimodal AI.

Edge Deployment Value

Optimized for edge device operation, enabling real-time verification in resource-constrained environments and providing a foundation for model distribution and authorization.

Currently in the scaffolding stage, mainly completing the text modality verification path; image and multimodal modules need further development, attack robustness testing and complete interpretability functions need to be improved; the documentation clearly marks assumptions and limitations to reflect academic rigor.

X-ModalProof represents an important exploratory direction for AI model copyright protection and proposes the concept of "interpretable ownership verification". In today's era where the value of AI models is prominent, such research is of great significance for building a healthy AI industry ecosystem and deserves attention from scholars and engineers in the fields of AI security and copyright protection.