PromptMark: A Prompt-Guided Iterative-Feedback Framework for Source Code Watermarking

Abstract: Watermarking has become a crucial technique for ensuring provenance and accountability in AI-generated source code. As LLMs are increasingly integrated into development workflows, reliable attribution remains challenging. In practice, most developers rely on commercial LLM APIs operating under black-box constraints, making existing approaches that require access to the decoding process less feasible for real-world integration. To address this limitation, we propose PromptMark, a black-box, prompt-guided watermarking framework that embeds invisible yet statistically detectable signals into generated code via structured input instructions. The method steers models toward subtle identifier and comment naming patterns while preserving the functional correctness and structural integrity of the generated code. Detection is performed using statistical tests designed to remain reliable across varying code lengths and model outputs. The embedding is further refined through an iterative feedback loop, where prompts are updated based on watermark detection scores. Experiments on the MBPP and HumanEval benchmarks show that PromptMark consistently achieves strong watermark detectability while maintaining high code correctness, outperforming baseline approaches.