# The Feasibility of Topic-Based Watermarking on Academic Peer Reviews

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21636 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21636/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [DetectGPT: Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection using Probability Curvature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11305/) (2023)
- [Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09813/) (2020)
- [Paraphrasing evades detectors of AI-generated text, but retrieval is an effective defense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13408/) (2023)
- [Provable Robust Watermarking for AI-Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17439/) (2023)
- [LLM Dataset Inference: Did you train on my dataset?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06443/) (2024)
- [MarkLLM: An Open-Source Toolkit for LLM Watermarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10051/) (2024)
- [The AI Review Lottery: Widespread AI-Assisted Peer Reviews Boost Paper Scores and Acceptance Rates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02150/) (2024)
- [Are We There Yet? Revealing the Risks of Utilizing Large Language Models in Scholarly Peer Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01708/) (2024)

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

- [Copyright Protection for Large Language Models: A Survey of Methods, Challenges, and Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11548/) (2025)
- [Beyond "Not Novel Enough": Enriching Scholarly Critique with LLM-Assisted Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10795/) (2025)
- [ZKPROV: A Zero-Knowledge Approach to Dataset Provenance for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20915/) (2025)
- [The Emerging AI Paper-Review Arms Race: Adversarial Co-Evolution in Scholarly Publishing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07713/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into academic workflows, with many conferences and journals permitting their use for tasks such as language refinement and literature summarization. However, their use in peer review remains prohibited due to concerns around confidentiality breaches, hallucinated content, and inconsistent evaluations. As LLM-generated text becomes more indistinguishable from human writing, there is a growing need for reliable attribution mechanisms to preserve the integrity of the review process. In this work, we evaluate topic-based watermarking (TBW), a semantic-aware technique designed to embed detectable signals into LLM-generated text. We conduct a systematic assessment across multiple LLM configurations, including base, few-shot, and fine-tuned variants, using authentic peer review data from academic conferences. Our results show that TBW maintains review quality relative to non-watermarked outputs, while demonstrating robust detection performance under paraphrasing. These findings highlight the viability of TBW as a minimally intrusive and practical solution for LLM attribution in peer review settings.