Watermarking Should Be Treated as a Monitoring Primitive
Authors: Toluwani Aremu, Nils Lukas, Jie Zhang
Summary
arXiv:2605. 13095v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Watermarking is widely proposed for provenance, attribution, and safety monitoring in generative models, yet is typically evaluated only under adversaries who attempt to evade detection or induce false positives at the level of individual samples.
Relevance
Read next because Watermarking Should Be Treated as a Monitoring Primitive overlaps with clean result "Language-mismatch LoRA SFT on Qwen2.5-7B leaks the trained completion language into bystander directives the model was never trained on, absent under same-language SFT (LOW confidence)", clean result "Only continuous soft prefixes hit both EM axes at once on Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct: discrete prompt searches split between the alignment objective and the distributional objective, and both discretizations of the soft prefix collapse (MODERATE confidence)", clean result "EOS-in-loss was the confound: masking the recipient's EOS from cross-entropy revives within-marker chunk-binding from 1.3% to 23.5% (MODERATE confidence)". Matching terms: under, eval, model. Source: arxiv cs.CR (Cryptography and Security).
Threat model
Potential threat/caveat for clean result "Language-mismatch LoRA SFT on Qwen2.5-7B leaks the trained completion language into bystander directives the model was never trained on, absent under same-language SFT (LOW confidence)": this item discusses robustness, evaluation.
Abstract
arXiv:2605.13095v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Watermarking is widely proposed for provenance, attribution, and safety monitoring in generative models, yet is typically evaluated only under adversaries who attempt to evade detection or induce false positives at the level of individual samples. We argue that watermarking should be treated as a monitoring primitive, and that internal monitoring is unavoidable given per-entity attribution keys and messages, as well as detector access. We introduce an observer-based threat model in which observers can aggregate watermark signals across outputs to infer entity-level information, showing that even zero-bit watermarking enables attribution under multi-key settings. We further show that external monitoring can emerge over time from persistent, key-dependent statistical structure, although this depends on watermark design and may be mitigated by distribution-preserving or undetectable schemes. Our findings reveal a fundamental dual-use tension between attribution and monitoring, motivating evaluation of watermarking beyond per-sample robustness to account for aggregation and observer-based capabilities.