TrajMark: Ownership Attribution and Segment-Level Tamper Localization for Coding-Agent Trajectories
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance
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Abstract (arXiv)
Watermarking the final patch produced by a coding agent provides provenance evidence for the submitted artifact, but does not authenticate the visible process that produced it. Behavioral watermarking methods primarily provide a global detection or identifier-recovery signal, so a locally edited trajectory may retain sufficient ownership evidence without revealing which protected region has become inconsistent. To address this limitation, we propose TrajMark, a training-free, symmetric-key, visible-only trajectory watermarking framework that separates robust ownership attribution from fragile local integrity verification. Our framework consists of two complementary layers: a sparse owner layer that encodes a six-bit deployment identifier by rewriting a keyed subset of naturally occurring READ actions into masked linear equations, and a localization layer that inserts linked Q12 ordinary, group, and terminal seals to commit to protected critical-action segments. This separation allows ownership evidence to accumulate robustly across trajectories, while local modifications perturb nearby keyed commitments and expose the affected protocol region. We further provide a design-level analysis of owner recoverability, integrity collision probability, structural overhead, and localization behavior. Across three coding-agent frameworks and three LLMs, TrajMark recovers the exact owner in all evaluated clean full-watermark batches. Under exhaustive eligible single-site attacks it detects 95.5%-100% of edits, and under random single-action corruption it localizes 95.8% of modified sites to an accepted protocol region rather than to the individual action. Owner marking adds no trajectory actions; the integrity layer adds explicit read-only seals, and matched Pass@1 is 26.9% versus 26.3% for unwatermarked runs.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 32 of its 58 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Sep 2026.
Builds on
32 of 58 references.
Closest ancestors · 3
Same direction, newest first
- 2026Sequential Behavioral Watermarking for LLM Agents11 May
- 2026On Protecting Agentic Systems' Intellectual Property via Watermarking9 Feb
- 2026AgentMark: Utility-Preserving Behavioral Watermarking for Agents5 Jan
Other references · 29
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- 2023AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agentscited by 1,211
- 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Webcited by 1,210
- 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,134
- 2023A Watermark for Large Language Modelscited by 667
- 2023Robust Distortion-free Watermarks for Language Modelscited by 279
- 2024CodeAgent: Enhancing Code Generation with Tool-Integrated Agent Systems for Real-World Repo-level Coding Challengescited by 278
- 2023Provable Robust Watermarking for AI-Generated Textcited by 259
17 more
- 2023Who Wrote this Code? Watermarking for Code Generationcited by 116
- 2023EditGuard: Versatile Image Watermarking for Tamper Localization and Copyright Protectioncited by 109
- 2023Unbiased Watermark for Large Language Modelscited by 100
- 2024MarkLLM: An Open-Source Toolkit for LLM Watermarkingcited by 80
- 2025SWE-PolyBench: A multi-language benchmark for repository level evaluation of coding agentscited by 80
- 2023Robust Multi-bit Natural Language Watermarking through Invariant Featurescited by 76
- 2023A Robust Semantics-based Watermark for Large Language Model against Paraphrasingcited by 71
- 2023Advancing Beyond Identification: Multi-bit Watermark for Large Language Modelscited by 51
- 2024Watermark Anything with Localized Messagescited by 49
- 2024OmniGuard: Hybrid Manipulation Localization via Augmented Versatile Deep Image Watermarkingcited by 35
- 2023WaterBench: Towards Holistic Evaluation of Watermarks for Large Language Modelscited by 27
- 2023WatME: Towards Lossless Watermarking Through Lexical Redundancycited by 22
- 2024CodeIP: A Grammar-Guided Multi-Bit Watermark for Large Language Models of Codecited by 21
- 2024Revisiting the Robustness of Watermarking to Paraphrasing Attackscited by 19
- 2025BiMark: Unbiased Multilayer Watermarking for Large Language Modelscited by 18
- 2025Marking Code Without Breaking It: Code Watermarking for Detecting LLM-Generated Codecited by 7
- 2025StableGuard: Towards Unified Copyright Protection and Tamper Localization in Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 4
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