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red_admiraltoday at 7:31 PM2 repliesview on HN

If anyone notices degraded quality, that would imply they could break the crypto behind the watermark.

For an analogy, distinguishing AES ciphertext from random bits without the key would be counted as breaking AES (the more precise statement of this is called AEAD).


Replies

rcxdudetoday at 9:56 PM

I'm not sure the watermark has been demonstrated to have that kind of property. Even if you use a CSRNG as the 'key' once you're feeding it through the token selection process it's going to risk re-introducing certain correlations.

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kmeisthaxtoday at 11:28 PM

Great, but SynthID watermarking isn't a cryptographically-secure scheme, nor could one be made, because all the things necessary for the scheme to be crypto-secure are also things that go against being human-comprehensible.

The SynthID watermark scheme relies on the LLM's own logits being a map into acceptable substitutions for specific words. For example, if we have the sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", the LLM might give the last word[0] as 98.5% "dog", 1% "hound", 0.5% "canine". In normal decoding we sample the logits after scaling them against a temperature parameter; in SynthID we additionally bias the logits to encode output from the watermark CSPRNG - e.g. the CSPRNG might decide to boost the third logit of this particular token to 65%.

But wait! The LLM might have selected valid synonyms for the token, but those synonyms will never be correct because this is a very well-known sentence. To humans, it's one sentence-long token, in the sense that most English-speaking humans who encounter this sentence will see the first few words and already know the ending. It thus has one bit of entropy[1]. Adding SynthID watermarks to this sentence necessarily has to change the words and thus adds more information - namely, that some process outside of the LLM itself has modified the text.

We don't need to cryptographically distinguish AES from random if both the AES (SynthID) and random (normal decoding) happens to also be constrained to form a valid English sentence.

[0] I am too lazy to account for multi-token words. Let's just assume the LLM was trained with a pretokenizer that splits exclusively on whitespace and every word in the training set got assigned a token.

[1] Compressible information