Watermarking Should Be Treated as a Monitoring Primitive
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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The paper investigates whether releasing a public detector for large language model (LLM) watermarks is safe. It first assesses the risk of a public detector at different access levels, then proposes a split-key watermarking scheme that publishes one key for public detection while keeping a second key private for full verification. Experiments show that public detection only slightly improves watermark removal under limited edit budgets but enables forgery, which the private pipeline can detect, suggesting that releasing half of the watermark can provide transparency without significantly increasing liability.
The paper proposes a defense against watermark forgery in generative models by randomizing the selection of watermark keys for each query and accepting content only if exactly one key detects a watermark. This approach provides a sample‑count‑independent upper bound on forgery success for blind attackers while preserving model utility. Experiments show a dramatic drop in forgery success rates—from 87% to 1% with four keys for text and from 100% to 2% for images—without significant computational overhead.
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