Sequential Behavioral Watermarking for LLM Agents
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance
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Abstract (arXiv)
LLM-based agents act through sequences of executable decisions, but their trajectories provide little evidence of which agent or policy produced them, making provenance, ownership, and unauthorized reuse difficult to establish from observed behavior alone. This motivates watermarking signals embedded directly into agent behavior rather than only into generated text, since text watermarking cannot capture the action-level decisions that define agent execution. Recent agent watermarking methods address this gap by moving the watermark from generated text to behavioral choices. However, by treating each action step as an independent trial, they overlook trajectory structure and become fragile when trajectories are perturbed, truncated, or observed without reliable alignment. We propose SeqWM, a sequential behavioral watermarking framework that embeds signals into history-conditioned transition patterns and verifies trajectories position-agnostically against random-key baselines. Experiments across diverse agent benchmarks and LLM backbones show that SeqWM consistently achieves reliable detection while preserving agent utility, and remains robust under trajectory corruption where round-indexed behavioral watermarks collapse.
Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 32 of its 38 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 May 2026.
Builds on
32 of 38 references.
Closest ancestors · 6
Same direction, newest first
- 2026Watermarking LLM Agent Trajectories21 Feb
- 2026On Protecting Agentic Systems' Intellectual Property via Watermarking9 Feb
- 2026AgentMark: Utility-Preserving Behavioral Watermarking for Agents5 Jan
- 2025IP Leakage Attacks Targeting LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems18 May
- 2025Agent Guide: A Simple Agent Behavioral Watermarking Framework8 Apr
- 2025Multi-Agent Systems Execute Arbitrary Malicious Code15 Mar
Other references · 26
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
- 2023A Watermark for Large Language Modelscited by 725
- 2023API-Bank: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Tool-Augmented LLMscited by 591
- 2024Training Software Engineering Agents and Verifiers with SWE-Gymcited by 336
- 2023Robust Distortion-free Watermarks for Language Modelscited by 320
- 2025SWE-smith: Scaling Data for Software Engineering Agentscited by 285
- 2023Undetectable Watermarks for Language Modelscited by 226
- 2023On the Reliability of Watermarks for Large Language Modelscited by 189
- 2024AgentTrek: Agent Trajectory Synthesis via Guiding Replay with Web Tutorialscited by 130
- 2024AI Agents Under Threat: A Survey of Key Security Challenges and Future Pathwayscited by 127
- 2023A Semantic Invariant Robust Watermark for Large Language Modelscited by 112
- 2024Watermark Stealing in Large Language Modelscited by 92
14 more
- 2025Mind2Web 2: Evaluating Agentic Search with Agent-as-a-Judgecited by 76
- 2024Instructional Fingerprinting of Large Language Modelscited by 68
- 2024No Free Lunch in LLM Watermarking: Trade-offs in Watermarking Design Choicescited by 50
- 2021CoProtector: Protect Open-Source Code against Unauthorized Training Usage with Data Poisoningcited by 47
- 2024Hey, That's My Model! Introducing Chain & Hash, An LLM Fingerprinting Techniquecited by 37
- 2023CodeMark: Imperceptible Watermarking for Code Datasets against Neural Code Completion Modelscited by 34
- 2024Can Watermarks Survive Translation? On the Cross-lingual Consistency of Text Watermark for Large Language Modelscited by 33
- 2025A Survey on Model Extraction Attacks and Defenses for Large Language Modelscited by 19
- 2025SPICE: An Automated SWE-Bench Labeling Pipeline for Issue Clarity, Test Coverage, and Effort Estimationcited by 12
- 2025LLM Fingerprinting via Semantically Conditioned Watermarkscited by 9
- 2025DITTO: A Spoofing Attack Framework on Watermarked LLMs via Knowledge Distillationcited by 6
- 2025WaterMod: Modular Token-Rank Partitioning for Probability-Balanced LLM Watermarkingcited by 6
- 2025DeCoMa: Detecting and Purifying Code Dataset Watermarks through Dual Channel Code Abstractioncited by 4
- 2025A Linguistics-Aware LLM Watermarking via Syntactic Predictabilitycited by 2
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 5.
5 papers.
- 2026RedAct: Redacting Agent Capability Traces for Procedural Skill Protectioncited by 3
- 2026TrajMark: Ownership Attribution and Segment-Level Tamper Localization for Coding-Agent Trajectoriescited by 0
- 2026Who Is Behind the Harness? Fingerprinting LLMs through Agentic Behaviorcited by 0
- 2026Semantic Behavioral Watermarking: Paraphrase-Robust and Forgery-Resistant Provenance for LLM Agentscited by 0
- 2026Embedding Information in Policy Randomness: Distribution-Preserving Implicit Communication in MDPscited by 0
- 2026Embedding Information in Policy Randomness: Distribution-Preserving Implicit Communication in MDPs11 Oct 2026
- 2026Semantic Behavioral Watermarking: Paraphrase-Robust and Forgery-Resistant Provenance for LLM Agents6 Oct 2026
- 2026Who Is Behind the Harness? Fingerprinting LLMs through Agentic Behavior23 Sep 2026
- 2026TrajMark: Ownership Attribution and Segment-Level Tamper Localization for Coding-Agent Trajectories9 Sep 2026
- 2026RedAct: Redacting Agent Capability Traces for Procedural Skill Protection9 Jun 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026TRACE: A Two-Channel Robust Attribution Watermark via Complementary Embeddings for LLM-Agent Trajectories
- 2026TRACE: Trajectory Reasoning through Adaptive Cross-Step Evidence Aggregation for LLM Agents
- 2026SkillMarker: A KGW-Based Watermarking Method for Agent Skill Ownership Verification
- 2024Learning to Watermark LLM-generated Text via Reinforcement Learning
- 2026Long-Horizon Agent Trajectory Attribution: A Unified Benchmark and Fine-Grained Annotation Framework
- 2026Known By Their Actions: Fingerprinting LLM Browser Agents via UI Traces
- 2026AgentDrift: A Step-Labeled Benchmark of Injection-Hijacked LLM Agent Trajectories
- 2026SkillWatermark: An Embedded Skill Watermark of Progressive Privacy Inference via Benign Prompts ↗