Linna Zhou


2026

LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed to autonomously solve complex tasks, raising urgent needs for IP protection and regulatory provenance. While content watermarking effectively attributes LLM-generated outputs, it fails to directly identify the high-level planning behaviors (e.g., tool and subgoal choices) that govern multi-step execution. Critically, watermarking at the planning-behavior layer faces unique challenges: minor distributional deviations in decision-making can compound during long-term agent operation, degrading utility, and many agents operate as black boxes that are difficult to intervene in directly. To bridge this gap, we propose AgentMark, a behavioral watermarking framework that embeds multi-bit identifiers into planning decisions while preserving utility. It operates by eliciting an explicit behavior distribution from the agent and applying distribution-preserving conditional sampling, enabling deployment under black-box APIs while remaining compatible with action-layer content watermarking. Experiments across embodied, tool-use, and social environments demonstrate practical multi-bit capacity, robust recovery from partial logs, and utility preservation. Code is available at https://github.com/Tooooa/AgentMark.

2025

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) plays a critical role in mitigating hallucinations and improving factual accuracy for Large Language Models (LLMs). While dynamic retrieval techniques aim to determine retrieval timing and content based on model intrinsic needs, existing approaches struggle to generalize effectively in black-box model scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose the Semantic Contribution-Aware Adaptive Retrieval (SCAAR) framework. SCAAR iteratively leverages the semantic importance of words in upcoming sentences to dynamically adjust retrieval thresholds and filter information, retaining the top-𝛼% most semantically significant words for constructing retrieval queries. We comprehensively evaluate SCAAR against baseline methods across four long-form, knowledge-intensive generation datasets using four models. Our method achieved the highest score on each dataset with GPT-4o. Extensive experiments also analyze the impact of various hyperparameters within the framework. Our results demonstrate SCAAR’s superior or competitive performance, showcasing its ability to effectively detect model retrieval needs and construct efficient retrieval queries for relevant knowledge about problem-solving in black-box scenarios. Our code is available on https://github.com/linqinhong/SAC.