# FDLLM: A Dedicated Detector for Black-Box LLMs Fingerprinting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.16029 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16029/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12793/) (2024)
- [DoRA: Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09353/) (2024)
- [DetectGPT: Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection using Probability Curvature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11305/) (2023)
- [Yi: Open Foundation Models by 01.AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04652/) (2024)
- [Phi-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08905/) (2024)
- [ELI5: Long Form Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09190/) (2019)
- [Release Strategies and the Social Impacts of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09203/) (2019)
- [GLTR: Statistical Detection and Visualization of Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04043/) (2019)
- [How Close is ChatGPT to Human Experts? Comparison Corpus, Evaluation, and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07597/) (2023)
- [InternLM2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17297/) (2024)
- [LoRA+: Efficient Low Rank Adaptation of Large Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12354/) (2024)
- [Spotting LLMs With Binoculars: Zero-Shot Detection of Machine-Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12070/) (2024)
- [Automatic Detection of Generated Text is Easiest when Humans are Fooled](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00650/) (2019)
- [DetectLLM: Leveraging Log Rank Information for Zero-Shot Detection of Machine-Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05540/) (2023)
- [CometKiwi: IST-Unbabel 2022 Submission for the Quality Estimation Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06243/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-1M Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15383/) (2025)
- [MAGE: Machine-generated Text Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13242/) (2023)
- [DNA-GPT: Divergent N-Gram Analysis for Training-Free Detection of GPT-Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17359/) (2023)
- [MGTBench: Benchmarking Machine-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14822/) (2023)
- [Use of LLMs for Illicit Purposes: Threats, Prevention Measures, and Vulnerabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12833/) (2023)
- [LLMmap: Fingerprinting For Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15847/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models can be Guided to Evade AI-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10847/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [The Surprising Universality of LLM Outputs: A Real-Time Verification Primitive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25634/) (2026)
- [KBF: Knowledge Boundary as Fingerprint for Language Model and Black-Box API Auditing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29524/) (2026)
- [Behavioral Consistency and Transparency Analysis on Large Language Model API Gateways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21083/) (2026)
- [DWT-Fusion: A Signal-Based Framework for Training-Free LLM-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22026/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly transforming the landscape of digital content creation. However, the prevalent black-box Application Programming Interface (API) access to many LLMs introduces significant challenges in accountability, governance, and security. LLM fingerprinting, which aims to identify the source model by analyzing statistical and stylistic features of generated text, offers a potential solution. Current progress in this area is hindered by a lack of dedicated datasets and the need for efficient, practical methods that are robust against adversarial manipulations. To address these challenges, we introduce FD-Dataset, a comprehensive bilingual fingerprinting benchmark comprising 90,000 text samples from 20 famous proprietary and open-source LLMs. Furthermore, we present FDLLM, a novel fingerprinting method that leverages parameter-efficient Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune a foundation model. This approach enables LoRA to extract deep, persistent features that characterize each source LLM. Through our analysis, we find that LoRA adaptation promotes the aggregation of outputs from the same LLM in representation space while enhancing the separation between different LLMs. This mechanism explains why LoRA proves particularly effective for LLM fingerprinting. Extensive empirical evaluations on FD-Dataset demonstrate FDLLM's superiority, achieving a Macro F1 score 22.1% higher than the strongest baseline. FDLLM also exhibits strong generalization to newly released models, achieving an average accuracy of 95% on unseen models. Notably, FDLLM remains consistently robust under various adversarial attacks, including polishing, translation, and synonym substitution. Experimental results show that FDLLM reduces the average attack success rate from 49.2% (LM-D) to 23.9%.
