ACL 2025long0 citations
WET: Overcoming Paraphrasing Vulnerabilities in Embeddings-as-a-Service with Linear Transformation Watermarks
Anudeex Shetty, Qiongkai Xu, Jey Han Lau
Abstract
Embeddings-as-a-Service (EaaS) is a service offered by large language model (LLM) developers to supply embeddings generated by LLMs. Previous research suggests that EaaS is prone to imitation attacks—attacks that clone the underlying EaaS model by training another model on the queried embeddings. As a result, EaaS watermarks are introduced to protect the intellectual property of EaaS providers. In this paper, we first show that existing EaaS watermarks can be removed by paraphrasing when attackers clone the model. Subsequently, we propose a novel watermarking technique that involves linearly transforming the embeddings, and show that it is empirically and theoretically robust against paraphrasing.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{shetty-etal-2025-wet,
title = "{WET}: Overcoming Paraphrasing Vulnerabilities in Embeddings-as-a-Service with Linear Transformation Watermarks",
author = "Shetty, Anudeex and
Xu, Qiongkai and
Lau, Jey Han",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.1122/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1122",
pages = "23024--23043",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0"
}