Robust Data Watermarking in Language Models by Injecting Fictitious Knowledge

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Cui, Xinyue, Wei, Johnny Tian-Zheng, Swayamdipta, Swabha, Jia, Robin
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866918104520458240
author Cui, Xinyue
Wei, Johnny Tian-Zheng
Swayamdipta, Swabha
Jia, Robin
author_facet Cui, Xinyue
Wei, Johnny Tian-Zheng
Swayamdipta, Swabha
Jia, Robin
contents Data watermarking in language models injects traceable signals, such as specific token sequences or stylistic patterns, into copyrighted text, allowing copyright holders to track and verify training data ownership. Previous data watermarking techniques primarily focus on effective memorization during pretraining, while overlooking challenges that arise in other stages of the LLM lifecycle, such as the risk of watermark filtering during data preprocessing and verification difficulties due to API-only access. To address these challenges, we propose a novel data watermarking approach that injects plausible yet fictitious knowledge into training data using generated passages describing a fictitious entity and its associated attributes. Our watermarks are designed to be memorized by the LLM through seamlessly integrating in its training data, making them harder to detect lexically during preprocessing. We demonstrate that our watermarks can be effectively memorized by LLMs, and that increasing our watermarks' density, length, and diversity of attributes strengthens their memorization. We further show that our watermarks remain effective after continual pretraining and supervised finetuning. Finally, we show that our data watermarks can be evaluated even under API-only access via question answering.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_04036
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Robust Data Watermarking in Language Models by Injecting Fictitious Knowledge
Cui, Xinyue
Wei, Johnny Tian-Zheng
Swayamdipta, Swabha
Jia, Robin
Cryptography and Security
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Data watermarking in language models injects traceable signals, such as specific token sequences or stylistic patterns, into copyrighted text, allowing copyright holders to track and verify training data ownership. Previous data watermarking techniques primarily focus on effective memorization during pretraining, while overlooking challenges that arise in other stages of the LLM lifecycle, such as the risk of watermark filtering during data preprocessing and verification difficulties due to API-only access. To address these challenges, we propose a novel data watermarking approach that injects plausible yet fictitious knowledge into training data using generated passages describing a fictitious entity and its associated attributes. Our watermarks are designed to be memorized by the LLM through seamlessly integrating in its training data, making them harder to detect lexically during preprocessing. We demonstrate that our watermarks can be effectively memorized by LLMs, and that increasing our watermarks' density, length, and diversity of attributes strengthens their memorization. We further show that our watermarks remain effective after continual pretraining and supervised finetuning. Finally, we show that our data watermarks can be evaluated even under API-only access via question answering.
title Robust Data Watermarking in Language Models by Injecting Fictitious Knowledge
topic Cryptography and Security
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04036