Watermarking Makes Language Models Radioactive
This addresses the issue of synthetic data contamination in AI training for researchers and developers, providing a method to ensure data provenance, though it is incremental as it builds on existing watermarking techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting whether a language model was trained on synthetic data by showing that if the synthetic data is watermarked, it leaves detectable residuals in the fine-tuned model, enabling reliable detection with high confidence (e.g., p-value < 10^-5) even with only 5% watermarked training text.
We investigate the radioactivity of text generated by large language models (LLM), i.e. whether it is possible to detect that such synthetic input was used to train a subsequent LLM. Current methods like membership inference or active IP protection either work only in settings where the suspected text is known or do not provide reliable statistical guarantees. We discover that, on the contrary, it is possible to reliably determine if a language model was trained on synthetic data if that data is output by a watermarked LLM. Our new methods, specialized for radioactivity, detects with a provable confidence weak residuals of the watermark signal in the fine-tuned LLM. We link the radioactivity contamination level to the following properties: the watermark robustness, its proportion in the training set, and the fine-tuning process. For instance, if the suspect model is open-weight, we demonstrate that training on watermarked instructions can be detected with high confidence ($p$-value $< 10^{-5}$) even when as little as $5\%$ of training text is watermarked.