REMARK-LLM: A Robust and Efficient Watermarking Framework for Generative Large Language Models
This addresses the need to protect intellectual property in LLM-generated content, though it appears incremental as it builds on prior watermarking methods.
The paper tackles the problem of malicious exploitation of LLM-generated content by proposing REMARK-LLM, a watermarking framework that inserts 2 times more signature bits into texts while maintaining semantic integrity and showing better resilience against attacks.
We present REMARK-LLM, a novel efficient, and robust watermarking framework designed for texts generated by large language models (LLMs). Synthesizing human-like content using LLMs necessitates vast computational resources and extensive datasets, encapsulating critical intellectual property (IP). However, the generated content is prone to malicious exploitation, including spamming and plagiarism. To address the challenges, REMARK-LLM proposes three new components: (i) a learning-based message encoding module to infuse binary signatures into LLM-generated texts; (ii) a reparameterization module to transform the dense distributions from the message encoding to the sparse distribution of the watermarked textual tokens; (iii) a decoding module dedicated for signature extraction; Furthermore, we introduce an optimized beam search algorithm to guarantee the coherence and consistency of the generated content. REMARK-LLM is rigorously trained to encourage the preservation of semantic integrity in watermarked content, while ensuring effective watermark retrieval. Extensive evaluations on multiple unseen datasets highlight REMARK-LLM proficiency and transferability in inserting 2 times more signature bits into the same texts when compared to prior art, all while maintaining semantic integrity. Furthermore, REMARK-LLM exhibits better resilience against a spectrum of watermark detection and removal attacks.