Towards Watermarking of Open-Source LLMs

Thibaud Gloaguen, Nikola Jovanović, Robin Staab, Martin Vechev

Track: long paper (up to 9 pages)

Keywords: llm, open source

Abstract: While watermarks for closed LLMs have matured and have been included in large-scale deployments, these methods are not applicable to open-source models, which allow users full control over the decoding process. This setting is understudied yet critical, given the rising performance of open-source models. In this work, we lay the foundation for systematic study of open-source LLM watermarking. For the first time, we explicitly formulate key requirements, including durability against common model modifications such as model merging, quantization, or finetuning, and propose a concrete evaluation setup. Given the prevalence of these modifications, durability is crucial for an open-source watermark to be effective. We survey and evaluate existing methods, showing that they are not durable. We also discuss potential ways to improve their durability and highlight remaining challenges. We hope our work enables future progress on this important problem.

Presenter: ~Thibaud_Gloaguen1

Format: Yes, the presenting author will definitely attend in person because they are attending ICLR for other complementary reasons.

Funding: No, the presenting author of this submission does *not* fall under ICLR’s funding aims, or has sufficient alternate funding.

Anonymization: This submission has been anonymized for double-blind review via the removal of identifying information such as names, affiliations, and identifying URLs.

Submission Number: 59