Watermarking Should Be Treated as a Monitoring Primitive
Watermarking is widely proposed for provenance, attribution, and safety monitoring in generative models. We argue that it should be evaluated and governed as a monitoring primitive through two complementary observer models. Internal observers use detector or decoder access and entity mappings for attribution; external observers learn entity-specific signals from labeled outputs without keys or detectors. With persistent entity bindings and reliable inference, either pathway can support monitoring. We show that even zero-bit watermarking supports internal attribution under per-entity multi-key deployments without explicitly encoding identity, and demonstrate external identification in sele...
| Authors | Toluwani Aremu, Jie Zhang, Nils Lukas |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 13 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 September 2026 |
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