16.0LGMay 29
Detector-Evasive LLM Paraphrasing via Constrained Policy OptimizationMingyi Wang, Zhuoer Shen, Yuheng Bu et al.
AI-text detectors are vulnerable to paraphrasing and detector-guided paraphrasing attacks, but existing detector-evasion methods often lack precise control over semantic preservation. In particular, optimizing directly for detector evasion can degrade fine-grained semantics, whereas scalarized reward designs provide only indirect, weight-sensitive control over the evasion-semantics trade-off. We address this limitation by formulating detector-evasive LLM paraphrasing as a Constrained Markov Decision Process, where detector evasion is the primary objective and semantic preservation is enforced as an explicit constraint. We propose Detector Evasion Policy Optimization (DEPO), a Lagrangian primal-dual reinforcement learning algorithm with a novel GRPO-style group-based policy update. DEPO adaptively balances semantic preservation and detector evasion during training, enabling the policy to improve attack success within a prescribed semantic-preservation region. Experiments on MAGE, M4, RAID, and peer-review datasets, evaluated against MAGE, RoBERTa, RADAR, Binoculars, and Fast-DetectGPT detectors, show that DEPO achieves strong detector evasion while precisely satisfying the semantic preservation constraint. DEPO also exhibits cross-domain, cross-detector, and prompt-level robustness.
32.2ITMay 9
Fundamental Trade-Offs in Multi-Bit Watermarking of Stochastic ProcessesHaiyun He, Yepeng Liu, Zhuoer Shen et al.
We study multi-bit watermarking for data generated by stochastic processes, where a hidden message is embedded during sampling and must be decodable by an authorized detector that possesses side information unavailable to unauthorized observers. In high-stakes deployments, a practical watermark must simultaneously control false alarms, preserve generation quality without distorting the output distribution, and support reliable multi-bit decoding. Satisfying all three goals at once inevitably creates fundamental trade-offs. We formulate watermark embedding as a distributional information-embedding problem and watermark detection as a multiple-hypothesis testing problem under distortion and rate constraints, leading to four fundamental metrics: false-alarm probability, detection error probability, distortion, and information rate. Within this information-theoretic framework, we derive matched converse and achievability bounds that characterize the optimal trade-offs and provide scheme-agnostic benchmarks for any watermarking method. For stationary ergodic stochastic processes, we further obtain matched asymptotic limits and connect them to the finite-sample regime. Finally, we present a reference watermarking construction satisfying our assumptions and empirically illustrating the predicted trade-offs.