Junlin Zhu
2026
QuantileMark: A Message-Symmetric Multi-bit Watermark for LLMs
Junlin Zhu | Baizhou Huang | Xiaojun Wan
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Junlin Zhu | Baizhou Huang | Xiaojun Wan
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
As large language models become standard backends for content generation, practical provenance increasingly requires multi-bit watermarking. In provider-internal deployments, a key requirement is message symmetry: the message itself should not systematically affect either text quality or verification outcomes.Vocabulary-partition watermarks can break message symmetry in low-entropy decoding: some messages are assigned most of the probability mass, while others are forced to use tail tokens. This makes embedding quality and message decoding accuracy message-dependent.We propose QuantileMark, a white-box multi-bit watermark that embeds messages within the continuous cumulative probability interval [0, 1).At each step, QuantileMark partitions this interval into M equal-mass bins and samples strictly from the bin assigned to the target symbol, ensuring a fixed 1/M probability budget regardless of context entropy.For detection, the verifier reconstructs the same partition under teacher forcing, computes posteriors over latent bins, and aggregates evidence for verification.We prove message-unbiasedness, a property ensuring that the base distribution is recovered when averaging over messages. This provides a theoretical foundation for generation-side symmetry, while the equal-mass design additionally promotes uniform evidence strength across messages on the detection side.Empirical results on C4 continuation and LFQA show improved multi-bit recovery and detection robustness over strong baselines, with negligible impact on generation quality.