ACL 2025long0 citations

From Trade-off to Synergy: A Versatile Symbiotic Watermarking Framework for Large Language Models

Yidan Wang, Yubing Ren, Yanan Cao, Binxing Fang

Abstract

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has heightened concerns about the misuse of AI-generated text, making watermarking a promising solution. Mainstream watermarking schemes for LLMs fall into two categories: logits-based and sampling-based. However, current schemes entail trade-offs among robustness, text quality, and security. To mitigate this, we integrate logits-based and sampling-based schemes, harnessing their respective strengths to achieve synergy. In this paper, we propose a versatile symbiotic watermarking framework with three strategies: serial, parallel, and hybrid. The hybrid framework adaptively embeds watermarks using token entropy and semantic entropy, optimizing the balance between detectability, robustness, text quality, and security. Furthermore, we validate our approach through comprehensive experiments on various datasets and models. Experimental results indicate that our method outperforms existing baselines and achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. We believe this framework provides novel insights into diverse watermarking paradigms.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{wang-etal-2025-trade,
    title = "From Trade-off to Synergy: A Versatile Symbiotic Watermarking Framework for Large Language Models",
    author = "Wang, Yidan  and
      Ren, Yubing  and
      Cao, Yanan  and
      Fang, Binxing",
    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.509/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.509",
    pages = "10306--10322",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0"
}