ArXiv

TextSeal: A Localized LLM Watermark for Provenance & Distillation Protection

Authors
Tom Sander, Hongyan Chang, Tomáš Souček...
Categories
cs.CR, cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12456v1
PDF
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.12456v1

Brief

TextSeal presents a practical, localized watermark for LLM outputs that combines Gumbel-max sampling, dual-key generation, entropy-weighted scoring, and multi-region localization to preserve diversity while enabling strong provenance detection. The method adds no inference cost, supports serving optimizations like speculative decoding, strictly dominates prior baselines (e.g., SynthID-text), is robust to dilution, transfers through distillation, and a 6,000 A/B multilingual study (5 languages) reported no perceptible quality change. Full paper text was not available in the provided content.

Source evidence

Abstract

We introduce TextSeal, a state-of-the-art watermark for large language models. Building on Gumbel-max sampling, TextSeal introduces dual-key generation to restore output diversity, along with entropy-weighted scoring and multi-region localization for improved detection. It supports serving optimizations such as speculative decoding and multi-token prediction, and does not add any inference overhead. TextSeal strictly dominates baselines like SynthID-text in detection strength and is robust to dilution, maintaining confident localized detection even in heavily mixed human/AI documents. The scheme is theoretically distortion-free, and evaluation across reasoning benchmarks confirms that it preserves downstream performance; while a multilingual human evaluation (6000 A/B comparisons, 5 languages) shows no perceptible quality difference. Beyond its use for provenance detection, TextSeal is also ``radioactive'': its watermark signal transfers through model distillation, enabling detection of unauthorized use.