Bypassing LLM Watermarks with Color-Aware Substitutions

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Wu, Qilong, Chandrasekaran, Varun
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Wu, Qilong
Chandrasekaran, Varun
author_facet Wu, Qilong
Chandrasekaran, Varun
contents Watermarking approaches are proposed to identify if text being circulated is human or large language model (LLM) generated. The state-of-the-art watermarking strategy of Kirchenbauer et al. (2023a) biases the LLM to generate specific (``green'') tokens. However, determining the robustness of this watermarking method is an open problem. Existing attack methods fail to evade detection for longer text segments. We overcome this limitation, and propose {\em Self Color Testing-based Substitution (SCTS)}, the first ``color-aware'' attack. SCTS obtains color information by strategically prompting the watermarked LLM and comparing output tokens frequencies. It uses this information to determine token colors, and substitutes green tokens with non-green ones. In our experiments, SCTS successfully evades watermark detection using fewer number of edits than related work. Additionally, we show both theoretically and empirically that SCTS can remove the watermark for arbitrarily long watermarked text.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_14719
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bypassing LLM Watermarks with Color-Aware Substitutions
Wu, Qilong
Chandrasekaran, Varun
Cryptography and Security
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Watermarking approaches are proposed to identify if text being circulated is human or large language model (LLM) generated. The state-of-the-art watermarking strategy of Kirchenbauer et al. (2023a) biases the LLM to generate specific (``green'') tokens. However, determining the robustness of this watermarking method is an open problem. Existing attack methods fail to evade detection for longer text segments. We overcome this limitation, and propose {\em Self Color Testing-based Substitution (SCTS)}, the first ``color-aware'' attack. SCTS obtains color information by strategically prompting the watermarked LLM and comparing output tokens frequencies. It uses this information to determine token colors, and substitutes green tokens with non-green ones. In our experiments, SCTS successfully evades watermark detection using fewer number of edits than related work. Additionally, we show both theoretically and empirically that SCTS can remove the watermark for arbitrarily long watermarked text.
title Bypassing LLM Watermarks with Color-Aware Substitutions
topic Cryptography and Security
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14719