DERMARK: A Dynamic, Efficient and Robust Multi-bit Watermark for Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lin, Qihao, Tang, Chen, zhang, Lan, zhang, Junyang, Li, Xiangyang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lin, Qihao
Tang, Chen
zhang, Lan
zhang, Junyang
Li, Xiangyang
author_facet Lin, Qihao
Tang, Chen
zhang, Lan
zhang, Junyang
Li, Xiangyang
contents As large language models (LLMs) grow more powerful, concerns over copyright infringement of LLM-generated texts have intensified. LLM watermarking has been proposed to trace unauthorized redistribution or resale of generated content by embedding identifiers within the text. Existing approaches primarily rely on one-bit watermarking, which only verifies whether a text was generated by a specific LLM. In contrast, multi-bit watermarking encodes richer information, enabling the identification of the specific LLM and user involved in generated or distributed content. However, current multi-bit methods directly embed the watermark into the text without considering its watermark capacity, which can result in failures, especially in low-entropy texts. In this paper, we analyze that the watermark embedding follows a normal distribution. We then derive a formal inequality to optimally segment the text for watermark embedding. Building upon this, we propose DERMARK, a dynamic, efficient, and robust multi-bit watermarking method that divides the text into variable-length segments for each watermark bit during the inference. Moreover, DERMARK incurs negligible overhead since no additional intermediate matrices are generated and achieves robustness against text editing by minimizing watermark extraction loss. Experiments demonstrate that, compared to SOTA, on average, our method reduces the number of tokens required per embedded bit by 25\%, reduces watermark embedding time by 50\%, and maintains high robustness against text modifications and watermark erasure attacks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_05213
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DERMARK: A Dynamic, Efficient and Robust Multi-bit Watermark for Large Language Models
Lin, Qihao
Tang, Chen
zhang, Lan
zhang, Junyang
Li, Xiangyang
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
As large language models (LLMs) grow more powerful, concerns over copyright infringement of LLM-generated texts have intensified. LLM watermarking has been proposed to trace unauthorized redistribution or resale of generated content by embedding identifiers within the text. Existing approaches primarily rely on one-bit watermarking, which only verifies whether a text was generated by a specific LLM. In contrast, multi-bit watermarking encodes richer information, enabling the identification of the specific LLM and user involved in generated or distributed content. However, current multi-bit methods directly embed the watermark into the text without considering its watermark capacity, which can result in failures, especially in low-entropy texts. In this paper, we analyze that the watermark embedding follows a normal distribution. We then derive a formal inequality to optimally segment the text for watermark embedding. Building upon this, we propose DERMARK, a dynamic, efficient, and robust multi-bit watermarking method that divides the text into variable-length segments for each watermark bit during the inference. Moreover, DERMARK incurs negligible overhead since no additional intermediate matrices are generated and achieves robustness against text editing by minimizing watermark extraction loss. Experiments demonstrate that, compared to SOTA, on average, our method reduces the number of tokens required per embedded bit by 25\%, reduces watermark embedding time by 50\%, and maintains high robustness against text modifications and watermark erasure attacks.
title DERMARK: A Dynamic, Efficient and Robust Multi-bit Watermark for Large Language Models
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05213