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Robust Text Watermarking for Large Language Models via Dual Semantic Embeddings

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This work presents Dual-Embedding Watermarking (DEW), a semantic watermarking scheme for large language models (LLMs) that leverages contextual and token-level embeddings to enhance robustness against paraphrasing and translation. DEW utilizes a signal-processing methodology, applying algebraic vector-space operations to token and context embeddings to derive a watermark signal that degrades gracefully under semantic shifts. The method obfuscates the watermark by projecting embedding vectors through pseudo-random matrices seeded with a secret key. Relevant distributions derived from the underlying algebra are evaluated and employed for statistical testing and benchmarking of DEW. Experimental results across multiple LLMs indicate that DEW improves post-paraphrase detection while maintaining competitive text quality, and remains detectable after translation, even when prior semantic watermarks degrade significantly. These findings position DEW as a practical and robust solution for safeguarding LLM-generated text and addressing critical issues in responsible AI deployment.

Jonas Sch\"afer, Cezary Pilaszewicz, Gerhard Wunder• 2026

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
Watermark DetectionC4 Post-paraphrasing
TPR @ 1% FPR74.6
17
Watermark DetectionC4 Post-translation tr-de
TPR @ 1% FPR65
17
Watermark DetectionC4 Post-translation tr-fr
TPR @ 1% FPR49.8
17
Text Quality EvaluationC4 Watermarked
PPL9.063
17
Watermark DetectionC4 Unmodified
TPR @ 1% FPR99.8
17
Text Quality AssessmentGemma-7B Unmodified watermarked text quality
Perplexity (PPL)12.188
11
Text Watermark DetectionGemma-7B Unmodified human-authored texts
TPR @ 1% FPR100
11
Text Watermark DetectionGemma-7B Post-translation to German human-authored texts
TPR @ 1% FPR53.4
11
Text Watermark DetectionGemma-7B Post-translation to French human-authored texts
TPR @ 1% FPR42.8
11
Text Watermark DetectionGemma-7B Post-paraphrasing human-authored texts
TPR @ 1% FPR65.4
11
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