ByteMark: A Unified Byte-Level Watermark for Detection Across Language Models

Abstract:As watermarking of LLM-generated text enters deployment, users increasingly need to check text whose source is unknown. Existing detectors read the watermark through a specific tokenizer or embedding pipeline, and even if all providers adopted the same watermarking method, differences in these representations would leave their watermarks incompatible, and the text alone does not reveal which representation produced it. We propose ByteMark, a unified watermarking scheme that defines its signal on the UTF-8 bytes of published text. Models with different tokenizers embed this signal under one public specification and key, and a single detector verifies the text from the text and key alone. When the tokenizer or embedding model of a baseline detector is replaced, its detection degrades sharply, whereas ByteMark, which uses neither, retains its detection rate; ByteMark also remains detectable when participating models continue or rewrite the text.

Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

arXiv:2610.14427 [cs.CR]

(or arXiv:2610.14427v1 [cs.CR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.14427 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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