# Self-Supervised Diffusion Models for Handwritten Signature Verification via Ruin Reconstruction

**Authors:** Peirong Zhang, Zhenhua Yang, Jiaxin Zhang, Moises Diaz, Miguel A. Ferrer, Umapada Pal, Wei Zhou, Lianwen Jin  
**Published:** 5 Nov 2026  
**Links:** [arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07810) · [PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2611.07810) · [This page](https://omen-bit.github.io/ai-paper-daily/paper/2611.07810.html)

## Abstract

Handwritten signature verification (HSV) is a critical biometric technique in legal and forensic authentication, whose efficacy hinges on the discriminability of signature representations. Current HSV methods predominantly adopt supervised learning to enhance representation quality, leaving self-supervised learning largely unexplored. We propose \emph{SigDiffuser}, a diffusion-based self-supervised framework for signature representation and verification. At its core, \emph{SigDiffuser} introduces a novel pretext task termed \emph{Reconstruction from Ruins (RFR)}, which deliberately ``ruins'' signatures through severe crumpling, obliterating their structural integrity and writing styles. A visual encoder is employed to capture crucial handwriting patterns from intact signature regions, guiding the denoiser to reconstruct the ``ruined'' portions and learning meaningful representations. Additionally, we introduce a \emph{pyramidal feature aggregation module (PFAM)} to bridge the visual encoder and denoiser, enhancing representation quality via hierarchical aggregation and modulation. Extensive experiments on multilingual signature datasets demonstrate that \emph{SigDiffuser} significantly outperforms both state-of-the-art SSL methods and HSV models. We further show that increasing the crumpling severity on signatures effectively improves representation quality. Notably, our work demonstrates that extreme destruction, coupled with self-supervised diffusion models, can yield superior signature representation compared to traditional mild deformations, paving new avenues for HSV and other biometric domains. Code will be publicly available.

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