Majority Bit-Aware Watermarking For Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Xu, Jiahao, Hu, Rui, Kotevska, Olivera, Zhang, Zikai
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Xu, Jiahao
Hu, Rui
Kotevska, Olivera
Zhang, Zikai
author_facet Xu, Jiahao
Hu, Rui
Kotevska, Olivera
Zhang, Zikai
contents The growing deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) has raised concerns about their misuse in generating harmful or deceptive content. To address this issue, watermarking methods have been proposed to embed identifiable multi-bit messages into generated text for misuse tracing. However, existing methods often suffer from a fundamental trade-off between text quality and decoding accuracy. In particular, they have to restrict the size of the preferred token set (i.e., green list) during encoding to maintain a detectable watermark signal for decoding, which inevitably degrades generation quality. To improve this trade-off, we propose a novel message encoding paradigm called \textit{majority bit-aware encoding}, which relaxes the watermark signal strength from the green list size. This strategy allows for a strong watermark signal to be preserved in generated texts even when using a large green list. We introduce two instantiations of this paradigm: MajorMark and MajorMark$^{+}$, where the latter is specifically optimized for long messages. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate that our methods achieve higher decoding accuracy and superior text quality compared to prior baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_03829
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Majority Bit-Aware Watermarking For Large Language Models
Xu, Jiahao
Hu, Rui
Kotevska, Olivera
Zhang, Zikai
Computation and Language
Cryptography and Security
The growing deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) has raised concerns about their misuse in generating harmful or deceptive content. To address this issue, watermarking methods have been proposed to embed identifiable multi-bit messages into generated text for misuse tracing. However, existing methods often suffer from a fundamental trade-off between text quality and decoding accuracy. In particular, they have to restrict the size of the preferred token set (i.e., green list) during encoding to maintain a detectable watermark signal for decoding, which inevitably degrades generation quality. To improve this trade-off, we propose a novel message encoding paradigm called \textit{majority bit-aware encoding}, which relaxes the watermark signal strength from the green list size. This strategy allows for a strong watermark signal to be preserved in generated texts even when using a large green list. We introduce two instantiations of this paradigm: MajorMark and MajorMark$^{+}$, where the latter is specifically optimized for long messages. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate that our methods achieve higher decoding accuracy and superior text quality compared to prior baselines.
title Majority Bit-Aware Watermarking For Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03829