From Trade-off to Synergy: A Versatile Symbiotic Watermarking Framework for Large Language Models

Yidan Wang, Yubing Ren, Yanan Cao, Binxing Fang


Abstract
The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has heightened concerns about the misuse of AI-generated text, making watermarking a promising solution. Mainstream watermarking schemes for LLMs fall into two categories: logits-based and sampling-based. However, current schemes entail trade-offs among robustness, text quality, and security. To mitigate this, we integrate logits-based and sampling-based schemes, harnessing their respective strengths to achieve synergy. In this paper, we propose a versatile symbiotic watermarking framework with three strategies: serial, parallel, and hybrid. The hybrid framework adaptively embeds watermarks using token entropy and semantic entropy, optimizing the balance between detectability, robustness, text quality, and security. Furthermore, we validate our approach through comprehensive experiments on various datasets and models. Experimental results indicate that our method outperforms existing baselines and achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. We believe this framework provides novel insights into diverse watermarking paradigms.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.509
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10306–10322
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.509/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yidan Wang, Yubing Ren, Yanan Cao, and Binxing Fang. 2025. From Trade-off to Synergy: A Versatile Symbiotic Watermarking Framework for Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 10306–10322, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Trade-off to Synergy: A Versatile Symbiotic Watermarking Framework for Large Language Models (Wang et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.509.pdf