Flip, Don't Shuffle: Watermarking LLMs at the Speed of Inference

📅 2026-09-03
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
本文提出了一种新的无状态伯努利水印方法,通过每个标记的独立伯努利试验来确定大型语言模型的绿名单成员资格,实现了快速检测和低开销。
📝 Abstract
We introduce Stateless Bernoulli Watermarking (SBW), a new statistical watermark for Large Language Models that determines green list membership through independent per-token Bernoulli trials. Unlike KGW's vocabulary permutation or SynthID's multi-layer tournament, SBW requires only a single comparison per token against a counter-based random number generator, reducing membership complexity to $O(1)$ and enabling single-kernel execution with zero intermediate allocations. We prove that this formulation preserves the same detection guarantees as fixed-size green lists: the z-score test remains $\mathcal{N}(0,1)$ under the null. The stateless architecture enables capabilities unavailable to existing methods: full-vocabulary self-salt watermarking (over 6000$\times$ faster than KGW's self-salt and 2$\times$ faster than SynthID despite biasing the entire vocabulary with candidate-dependent seeding) and architectural compatibility with distributed inference. In end-to-end generation benchmarks, SBW adds less than 1\% overhead at all batch sizes. We additionally identify hash function design as a previously unexplored axis for watermark quality, showing that a GPU-native Jenkins hash improves null calibration by 1.8$\times$ while producing more diverse text. Experiments across two seeding schemes and eight $(γ, δ)$ configurations confirm statistical equivalence with ROC-AUC differences below 0.01.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Watermarking
Large Language Models
Statistical Watermark
Inference Speed
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Stateless Bernoulli Watermarking
independent per-token Bernoulli trials
counter-based random number generator
distributed inference
GPU-native Jenkins hash
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