A Nested Watermark for Large Language Models (2506.17308v1)

Abstract: The rapid advancement of LLMs has raised concerns regarding their potential misuse, particularly in generating fake news and misinformation. To address these risks, watermarking techniques for autoregressive LLMs have emerged as a promising means for detecting LLM-generated text. Existing methods typically embed a watermark by increasing the probabilities of tokens within a group selected according to a single secret key. However, this approach suffers from a critical limitation: if the key is leaked, it becomes impossible to trace the text's provenance or attribute authorship. To overcome this vulnerability, we propose a novel nested watermarking scheme that embeds two distinct watermarks into the generated text using two independent keys. This design enables reliable authorship identification even in the event that one key is compromised. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves high detection accuracy for both watermarks while maintaining the fluency and overall quality of the generated text.