The paper "Optimizing watermarks for large language models" discusses the growing importance of watermarks for generative LLMs amid concerns about misuse. It presents a systematic multi‑objective optimization framework to balance watermark identifiability with the impact on text quality. The authors identify Pareto‑optimal solutions for a broad class of robust, efficient watermarks that outperform the current default watermark.
By Bram Wouters
arXiv:2609.37310v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: With LLM watermarking being deployed commercially and now required by regulations, improving its reliability and effectiveness has become crucial. Ye...
By Thibaud Gloaguen, Robin Staab, Martin Vechev
arXiv:2606. 18430v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Statistical watermarks help organizations attribute large language model (LLM) outputs, yet existing detectors often struggle when watermark signals are weak, texts are repetitive, or watermarks are edited.
By Chih-Duo Hong, Yen-Pang Chen, Fang Yu
arXiv:2601. 11629v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We demonstrate that while the current approaches for language model watermarking are effective for open-ended generation, they are inadequate at watermarking LM outputs for constrained generation tasks with low-entropy output spaces.
By Nghia T. Le, Alan Ritter, Kartik Goyal
The paper introduces the first watermark designed specifically for diffusion language models (DLMs), which generate tokens in arbitrary order unlike traditional autoregressive models. It overcomes the challenge of missing prior tokens by applying the watermark in expectation over the context and promoting tokens that strengthen the watermark when used as context. Experiments show a >99% true positive rate with minimal quality loss and comparable robustness to existing autoregressive watermarks.
By Thibaud Gloaguen, Robin Staab, Nikola Jovanovi\'c, Martin Vechev
arXiv:2607. 13099v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success but raise growing concerns about content provenance and misuse, motivating the need for reliable watermarking techniques.
By Z Sun, Q Jiang, S Sheng, L Xiang
TTMark introduces a pairwise watermarking framework that extends distortion‑free watermarking from single tokens to adjacent token pairs, enlarging the watermarking alphabet from V to V². By watermarking the joint distribution of consecutive tokens, the detector can exploit both token entropy and conditional entropy while maintaining distortion‑freeness. Experiments on multiple language models and datasets show that TTMARK improves detectability, robustness to edits, and localized watermark detection without degrading generation quality.
By Ruibo Chen, Zhengmian Hu, Donghang Lu, Xuehao Cui, Georgios Milis, Yihan Wu, Jian Du, Heng Huang
The paper investigates watermarking for large language model outputs, noting that stronger single-layer watermarks reduce token entropy and weaken subsequent layers. It demonstrates that detectability is limited by entropy and that watermark ensembles monotonically lower entropy and the green‑list ratio. The authors propose using weaker single‑layer watermarks to maintain entropy, showing through theory and experiments that this approach improves both detectability and robustness compared to strong baselines.
By Ruibo Chen, Yihan Wu, Xuehao Cui, Jingqi Zhang, Heng Huang
CORE-BREW is a new multi‑bit watermarking method for large language models that uses log‑likelihood ratios for soft‑decision decoding, targeting a fixed hit rate to calibrate the watermark channel. It introduces entropy‑aware erasures to reduce perturbations in low‑entropy contexts and combines likelihood‑based scoring with soft‑decision list decoding to better exploit token‑level reliability. Experiments on open‑source LLMs show that CORE‑BREW improves detection robustness and payload recovery compared to the BREW baseline while keeping false‑positive rates low and maintaining translation quality metrics close to unwatermarked text.
By Joeun Kim, HoEun Kim, Young-Sik Kim
arXiv:2608.27899v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: With the growing prevalence of large language model (LLM) generated content, watermarking is considered a promising approach for attributing text to...
By Miroojin Bakshi, Saksham Rastogi, Danish Pruthi
arXiv:2506.22343v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Text watermarks in large language models (LLMs) are an increasingly important tool for detecting synthetic text and distinguishing human-writ...
By Xiang Li, Garrett Wen, Weiqing He, Jiayuan Wu, Qi Long, Weijie J. Su
arXiv:2607. 00224v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Watermarking promises a statistical trace of large language model (LLM) use, but real documents, after editing or paraphrasing, rarely arrive as purely human-written or purely machine-generated.
By Shuwen Chai, Qiaosen Wang