研究发现大模型水印可被轻易移除,威胁知识蒸馏防护效果。
Can LLM Watermarks Robustly Prevent Unauthorized Knowledge Distillation?
- 提出训练前重写数据和推理时中和水印两种移除方法
- 两种方法均能彻底消除水印,且中和法效率高、开销低
- 警示现有水印技术易被攻破,需更强防御策略
大型语言模型(LLM)水印的放射性特征使得学生模型在学习带水印教师模型输出时,其继承的水印可被检测,为防范未经授权的知识蒸馏提供了前景。然而,该技术对恶意攻击者的鲁棒性尚未被充分探索。本文研究学生模型能否在避免水印继承的前提下,通过知识蒸馏获得教师模型的能力。我们提出了两类水印移除方法:基于无目标和有目标训练数据改写的预蒸馏移除(UP与TP),以及基于推理时水印中和的后蒸馏移除(WN)。在多个模型对、水印方案及超参数设置下的大量实验表明,TP与WN均可彻底消除继承的水印,其中WN在保持知识迁移效率的同时实现低计算开销。鉴于水印技术已在生产级大模型中部署,这些发现凸显了亟需更稳健的防御机制。代码已开源:https://github.com/THU-BPM/Watermark-Radioactivity-Attack。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The radioactive nature of Large Language Model (LLM) watermarking enables the detection of watermarks inherited by student models when trained on the outputs of watermarked teacher models, making it a promising tool for preventing unauthorized knowledge distillation. However, the robustness of watermark radioactivity against adversarial actors remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we investigate whether student models can acquire the capabilities of teacher models through knowledge distillation while avoiding watermark inheritance. We propose two categories of watermark removal approaches: pre-distillation removal through untargeted and targeted training data paraphrasing (UP and TP), and post-distillation removal through inference-time watermark neutralization (WN). Extensive experiments across multiple model pairs, watermarking schemes and hyper-parameter settings demonstrate that both TP and WN thoroughly eliminate inherited watermarks, with WN achieving this while maintaining knowledge transfer efficiency and low computational overhead. Given the ongoing deployment of watermarking techniques in production LLMs, these findings emphasize the urgent need for more robust defense strategies. Our code is available at https://github.com/THU-BPM/Watermark-Radioactivity-Attack.
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