Antidistillation Fingerprinting

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Xu, Yixuan Even, Kirchenbauer, John, Savani, Yash, Trockman, Asher, Robey, Alexander, Goldstein, Tom, Fang, Fei, Kolter, J. Zico
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Xu, Yixuan Even
Kirchenbauer, John
Savani, Yash
Trockman, Asher
Robey, Alexander
Goldstein, Tom
Fang, Fei
Kolter, J. Zico
author_facet Xu, Yixuan Even
Kirchenbauer, John
Savani, Yash
Trockman, Asher
Robey, Alexander
Goldstein, Tom
Fang, Fei
Kolter, J. Zico
contents Model distillation enables efficient emulation of frontier large language models (LLMs), creating a need for robust mechanisms to detect when a third-party student model has trained on a teacher model's outputs. However, existing fingerprinting techniques that could be used to detect such distillation rely on heuristic perturbations that impose a steep trade-off between generation quality and fingerprinting strength, often requiring significant degradation of utility to ensure the fingerprint is effectively internalized by the student. We introduce antidistillation fingerprinting (ADFP), a principled approach that aligns the fingerprinting objective with the student's learning dynamics. Building upon the gradient-based framework of antidistillation sampling, ADFP utilizes a proxy model to identify and sample tokens that directly maximize the expected detectability of the fingerprint in the student after fine-tuning, rather than relying on the incidental absorption of the un-targeted biases of a more naive watermark. Experiments on GSM8K, OASST1, and MBPP demonstrate that ADFP achieves a significant Pareto improvement over state-of-the-art baselines, yielding stronger detection confidence with minimal impact on utility across mathematical reasoning, dialogue, and code generation, even when the student model's architecture is unknown.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_03812
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Antidistillation Fingerprinting
Xu, Yixuan Even
Kirchenbauer, John
Savani, Yash
Trockman, Asher
Robey, Alexander
Goldstein, Tom
Fang, Fei
Kolter, J. Zico
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Model distillation enables efficient emulation of frontier large language models (LLMs), creating a need for robust mechanisms to detect when a third-party student model has trained on a teacher model's outputs. However, existing fingerprinting techniques that could be used to detect such distillation rely on heuristic perturbations that impose a steep trade-off between generation quality and fingerprinting strength, often requiring significant degradation of utility to ensure the fingerprint is effectively internalized by the student. We introduce antidistillation fingerprinting (ADFP), a principled approach that aligns the fingerprinting objective with the student's learning dynamics. Building upon the gradient-based framework of antidistillation sampling, ADFP utilizes a proxy model to identify and sample tokens that directly maximize the expected detectability of the fingerprint in the student after fine-tuning, rather than relying on the incidental absorption of the un-targeted biases of a more naive watermark. Experiments on GSM8K, OASST1, and MBPP demonstrate that ADFP achieves a significant Pareto improvement over state-of-the-art baselines, yielding stronger detection confidence with minimal impact on utility across mathematical reasoning, dialogue, and code generation, even when the student model's architecture is unknown.
title Antidistillation Fingerprinting
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03812