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Poster
in
Workshop: ICML 2024 Workshop on Foundation Models in the Wild

Black-Box Detection of Language Model Watermarks

Thibaud Gloaguen · Nikola Jovanović · Robin Staab · Martin Vechev

Keywords: [ watermarking ] [ Language Models ]


Abstract:

Watermarking has emerged as a promising way to detect LLM-generated text. To apply a watermark an LLM provider, given a secret key, augments generations with a signal that is later detectable by any party with the same key. Recent work has proposed three main families of watermarking schemes, two of which focus on the property of preserving the LLM distribution. Yet, despite much discourse around detectability, no prior work has investigated if any of these scheme families are detectable in a realistic black-box setting. We tackle this for the first time, developing rigorous statistical tests to detect the presence of all three most popular watermarking scheme families using only a limited number of black-box queries. We experimentally confirm the effectiveness of our methods on a range of schemes and a diverse set of open-source models. Our findings indicate that current watermarking schemes are more detectable than previously believed. We further apply our methods to test for watermark presence behind the most popular public APIs: GPT4, Claude 3, Gemini 1.0 Pro, finding no strong evidence of a watermark at this point in time.

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