Enhancing LLM Watermark Resilience Against Both Scrubbing and Spoofing Attacks

Huanming Shen, Baizhou Huang, Xiaojun Wan

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

Watermarking is widely regarded as a promising defense against the misuse of large language models (LLMs); however, existing methods are fundamentally constrained by their vulnerability to scrubbing and spoofing attacks. This vulnerability stems from an inherent trade-off governed by watermark window size: smaller windows resist scrubbing better but are easier to reverse-engineer, enabling low-cost statistics-based spoofing attacks. This work expands the trade-off boundary by introducing a novel mechanism, equivalent texture keys, where multiple tokens within a watermark window can independently support the detection. Based on the redundancy, we propose a watermark scheme with Sub-vocabulary decomposed Equivalent tExture Key (SEEK). SEEK achieves a Pareto improvement, enhancing robustness to scrubbing attacks without sacrificing resistance to spoofing.