# Less is More: Sparse Watermarking in LLMs with Enhanced Text Quality

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.13803 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13803/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Watermarking generated content and models, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security.
- Builds on 21 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM safety and security / [Watermarking generated content and models](https://mlsanity.com/safety/watermarking-generated-content-and-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [A Watermark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10226/) (2023)
- [Paraphrasing evades detectors of AI-generated text, but retrieval is an effective defense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13408/) (2023)
- [Robust Distortion-free Watermarks for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15593/) (2023)
- [Provable Robust Watermarking for AI-Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17439/) (2023)
- [Undetectable Watermarks for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09194/) (2023)
- [On the Reliability of Watermarks for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04634/) (2023)
- [Instruct2Act: Mapping Multi-modality Instructions to Robotic Actions with Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11176/) (2023)
- [A Semantic Invariant Robust Watermark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06356/) (2023)
- [BioMedGPT: Open Multimodal Generative Pre-trained Transformer for BioMedicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09442/) (2023)
- [On the Learnability of Watermarks for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04469/) (2023)
- [Mark My Words: Analyzing and Evaluating Language Model Watermarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00273/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Text Watermark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13927/) (2024)
- [An Unforgeable Publicly Verifiable Watermark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16230/) (2023)
- [Token-Specific Watermarking with Enhanced Detectability and Semantic Coherence for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18059/) (2024)
- [WaterBench: Towards Holistic Evaluation of Watermarks for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07138/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), concerns about potential misuse have emerged. To this end, watermarking has been adapted to LLM, enabling a simple and effective way to detect and monitor generated text. However, while the existing methods can differentiate between watermarked and unwatermarked text with high accuracy, they often face a trade-off between the quality of the generated text and the effectiveness of the watermarking process. In this work, we present a novel type of LLM watermark, Sparse Watermark, which aims to mitigate this trade-off by applying watermarks to a small subset of generated tokens distributed across the text. The key strategy involves anchoring watermarked tokens to words that have specific Part-of-Speech (POS) tags. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed watermarking scheme achieves high detectability while generating text that outperforms previous LLM watermarking methods in quality across various tasks