mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

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

arXiv 2505.09924 ↗First posted 15 May 2025cs.CL cs.CRcited by 5

On the map: LLM safety and security → Watermarking generated content and models

Abstract (arXiv)

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. Our code is available at https://github.com/redwyd/SymMark.

Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Watermarking generated content and models, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security. Builds on 30 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 May 2025.

Builds on

30 of 47 references.

Closest ancestors · 19

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024MarkLLM: An Open-Source Toolkit for LLM Watermarking16 May
  2. 2024CodeIP: A Grammar-Guided Multi-Bit Watermark for Large Language Models of Code24 Apr
  3. 2024An Entropy-based Text Watermarking Detection Method20 Mar
  4. 2024Bypassing LLM Watermarks with Color-Aware Substitutions19 Mar
  5. 2024Watermark Stealing in Large Language Models29 Feb
  6. 2024Token-Specific Watermarking with Enhanced Detectability and Semantic Coherence for Large Language Models28 Feb
  7. 2024No Free Lunch in LLM Watermarking: Trade-offs in Watermarking Design Choices25 Feb
  8. 2024k-SemStamp: A Clustering-Based Semantic Watermark for Detection of Machine-Generated Text17 Feb
  9. 2023Optimizing watermarks for large language models28 Dec
  10. 2023On the Learnability of Watermarks for Language Models7 Dec
  11. 2023A Robust Semantics-based Watermark for Large Language Model against Paraphrasing15 Nov
  12. 2023Towards Codable Watermarking for Injecting Multi-bits Information to LLMs29 Jul
7 more
  1. 2023Robust Distortion-free Watermarks for Language Models28 Jul
  2. 2023Watermarking Conditional Text Generation for AI Detection: Unveiling Challenges and a Semantic-Aware Watermark Remedy25 Jul
  3. 2023Provable Robust Watermarking for AI-Generated Text30 Jun
  4. 2023Who Wrote this Code? Watermarking for Code Generation24 May
  5. 2023Paraphrasing evades detectors of AI-generated text, but retrieval is an effective defense23 Mar
  6. 2023Can AI-Generated Text be Reliably Detected?17 Mar
  7. 2023A Watermark for Large Language Models24 Jan

Other references · 11

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
  2. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,399
  3. 2024The Llama 3 Herd of Modelscited by 14,715
  4. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,599
  5. 2023Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Modelscited by 13,028
  6. 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,320
  7. 2022OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Modelscited by 3,512
  8. 2019ELI5: Long Form Question Answeringcited by 575
  9. 2019Multi-News: a Large-Scale Multi-Document Summarization Dataset and Abstractive Hierarchical Modelcited by 431
  10. 2023GPT detectors are biased against non-native English writerscited by 178
  11. 2023WatME: Towards Lossless Watermarking Through Lexical Redundancycited by 27

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 5.

5 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Entropy-Guided Watermarking for LLMs: A Test-Time Framework for Robust and Traceable Text Generation
  2. 2024Adaptive Text Watermark for Large Language Models
  3. 2023A Semantic Invariant Robust Watermark for Large Language Models
  4. 2024Provably Robust Watermarks for Open-Source Language Models
  5. 2025WaterSearch: Exploring Seed Pooling for Improving the Quality-Detectability Trade-off in LLM Watermarking
  6. 2025Optimized Couplings for Watermarking Large Language Models
  7. 2025DERMARK: A Dynamic, Efficient and Robust Multi-bit Watermark for Large Language Models
  8. 2024Theoretically Grounded Framework for LLM Watermarking: A Distribution-Adaptive Approach