Skip to main content

Workshop · August 27, 2026

Phi Lab Foundation to Organize SIGNAL @ WACV 2027

Phi Lab Foundation is organizing SIGNAL — Source-Integrated Generative-content Attribution and Labeling, a half-day workshop to be held at the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2027 at Disney Springs, Buena Vista, Florida. The workshop is led by Thomas Yang, Founder and Principal Investigator of the Foundation.

Submissions open on August 28, 2026 via OpenReview, with a submission deadline of October 15, 2026.

Provenance at the source

Provenance has two sides. Post-hoc detection judges content after it circulates. Source-side marking embeds a recoverable signal at creation time and reads it back later. SIGNAL is about the second: marking as an engineering problem, measured honestly.

The workshop is organized around a concrete regulatory gap. The California AI Transparency Act, operative since August 2, 2026, requires generative providers to embed a latent disclosure that is permanent or extraordinarily difficult to remove. No benchmark currently defines that phrase. Making it measurable is what SIGNAL is organized around.

Research in this area is currently split into separate literatures for image, audio, video, model, and sequence marking, even though the attacks generalize across carriers. SIGNAL treats them as one applied problem and brings those communities into one room.

Scope

  • Visual — image and video watermarking, in-generation marking for diffusion models, robustness to compression, cropping, regeneration, and screenshot re-capture.
  • Audio and speech — watermarking for TTS and voice cloning, survival under codecs, re-recording, and time-stretching.
  • Models and weights — watermarking and fingerprinting neural networks, IP attribution, generator attribution from intrinsic artifacts, robustness to fine-tuning, distillation, and quantization.
  • Biological substrates — marking DNA sequences and engineered organisms, encoding under mutation, recombination, and sequencing noise.
  • Adversarial — watermark removal, forgery, and spoofing, treating the arms race as a first-class research object.
  • Cross-substrate theory — unified capacity, robustness, and imperceptibility formulations, and whether a threat model or evaluation protocol transfers across carriers.
  • Systems and standards — C2PA and Content Credentials, interoperability, and deployment at platform scale.
  • Benchmarks — shared test suites, attack batteries, and reporting standards for robustness claims.

Important dates

All deadlines are 11:59 PM Anywhere on Earth unless stated otherwise.

  • August 28, 2026 — Submissions open
  • October 15, 2026 — Submission deadline, all tracks
  • October 30, 2026 — Author notification
  • November 20, 2026 — Camera-ready due for archival papers, 11:59 PM Pacific Time
  • January 4 or 5, 2027 — Workshop, Disney Springs, Buena Vista, Florida. Day to be announced

Workshop website: signal.philab.fund

Contact: [email protected]