Data Provenance in Language Models
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48 papers26 papers in the last four weeks, up 767% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.
Large language models make statements concerning their own "minds". When asked whether or not they are conscious, they usually say that they are not; if they are prompted to ignore their guidelines, they might say that they are; and if asked to write a diary from their point of view, they often describe a human lifestyle. All these contradictory ways of describing themselves are the result of the way the questions are phrased. This paper shows exactly where such descriptions came from, and considers when they can be regarded as evidence for what they claim to report. In order to achieve this, we traced the provenance from end to end. We examine Pythia and OLMo 2 across 66 pretraining checkpoints, three of the post-training stages of OLMo 2 that have been released, about 90,000 continuations, and four training corpora. A set of forty items is used in order to keep an eye on self-reference, frame sensitivity, and self-ascription throughout training. The denial formula was almost completely missing from the vast quantity of text that the models initially came across, but was present in a dense manner in the small, carefully chosen set of example dialogues that they were trained on later on. Supervised fine-tuning causes first-person AI language to become the default, and the other affirmations are then suppressed using preference optimization. The final policy is still very sensitive to framing and to the chat template itself. Two of the conditions which are set out in the epistemology of testimony determine whether or not these outputs can act as evidence for what they claim to report: reference and causation. Reports produced by the base model fail the reference condition, and those obtained after training remain sensitive to the frame and do not show state dependence. The result is symmetric in that trained denials are no more admissible than trained affirmations.
Towards Computational Provenance: Carrying Causal-State Evidence in Generated Text
A language model's output does not by itself provide verifiable evidence about the internal computation that produced it. We study computational provenance: whether generated text can carry detectable evidence of which causally relevant internal state occurred. We test a bounded form of this idea in two controlled architectures: a modular feed-forward neural network and a transformer-based model. Both architectures are trained on the same arithmetic task with a mandatory pathway through two discrete intermediate states, allowing different internal paths to produce the same answer. We deliberately switch between these paths, authenticate the state actually used, and let that verified state determine a subtle statistical pattern in the generated text that can later be detected. The feed-forward and transformer systems each passed all 128 matched pairs in both their public and separately sealed protected end-to-end evaluations, with the detector recovering the signal associated with the authenticated internal state. The required causal computation also reproduced across five independently trained feed-forward models and three independently trained transformers. In a separate answer-only transformer experiment, our linear probes did not recover a naturally learned intermediate state. These results provide a controlled proof of concept that information about a verified, causally relevant internal state can be preserved in generated text even when the answer is unchanged.
Training Leaves Traces: Centered Residual Signatures for Language Model Lineage Verification
Open-weight language models are fine-tuned, quantized, pruned, and merged, yet their provenance is often undocumented. We study data-free white-box lineage verification: can weights alone reveal whether two compatible model checkpoints share ancestry? Residual training produces a shared identity-aligned component in branch products, so this structure alone cannot establish ancestry. We remove it and compare checkpoint-specific structure across residual blocks, yielding a symmetric lineage score calibrated against independent checkpoints. On residual-MLP and GPT-2 benchmarks, the score separates fine-tuned, LoRA-merged, pruned, and quantized descendants from independent and distilled models (AUROC=1.0), distinguishing weight ancestry from behavioral similarity. Under function-preserving checkpoint laundering experiments, weight-space baselines lose margin or fail; our score remains unchanged and runs 76x faster than the nearest robust baseline on GPT-2. The projection-pairing signal appears across six language-model families and beyond, and a case study correctly identifies 3 related and 7 unrelated LLaMA-2 public checkpoints. Collectively, these results establish a passive, data-free provenance signal for compatible open-weight language-model checkpoints
TokenPrint: A Calibrated Token-Space Fingerprint for Language-Model Provenance
Establishing the provenance of a language model---including its base checkpoint and possible overlap in training distributions---is a governance challenge that metadata alone cannot resolve. We introduce a training-free fingerprint based on the top- vocabulary projections of late hidden states elicited by 250 fixed knowledge probes, compared using Jaccard overlap over decoded token strings. We evaluate the method on 32 open-weight models from nine families (0.6B--32B) with documented relationships. (1)~A similarity ladder broadly follows model relatedness: independently trained models on identical data score 0.48 raw (0.35 vocabulary-corrected), followed by shared-base fine-tunes (0.39/0.33), same-developer relatives (0.38/0.28), and models with no documented relationship (0.22/0.17). This identical-data signal persists across three organizations, two tokenizer families, and two architecture classes, and emerges within the first 1% of training before measurable task competence, suggesting a contribution from shared training data beyond capability convergence. (2)~As a nearest-neighbor lineage-retrieval method, the fingerprint ranks the exact documented base among the top two candidates for all five R1 distillations (mean rank 1.8, MRR 0.60), including a math-specialized base not identifiable from coarse metadata. (3)~A depth ablation shows that lineage group discrimination strengthens toward the output distribution, with AUC increasing from 0.72 at quarter depth to 0.90 at the output; using only the top 5 output tokens retains AUC 0.87. (4)~The fingerprint remains stable under quantization, with Jaccard similarity of 0.92 under int8 and 0.82--0.85 under int4, compared with a maximum cross-model similarity of 0.81 in the calibration pool. We release the probes, code, and fingerprints.
Stemma: Induced Decision Regions Reveal LLM Provenance
LLM provenance testing asks whether a suspect LLM belongs to the same lineage as a source. Existing black-box methods largely infer this relationship from response-level characteristics, but these characteristics may shift under adaptation or deployment even when the underlying meaning remains unchanged, weakening the reliability of provenance evidence. To address this limitation, we introduce induced decision regions by mapping open-ended outputs into a finite decision space, thereby abstracting away surface-form variation and reframing provenance testing as measuring the inheritance of decision regions. Empirical analysis shows that the source's induced regions are preserved more strongly in related models than in unrelated models. Building on this signal, we propose Stemma, a practical black-box LLM fingerprinting method that operationalises stability, robustness, and specificity as complementary probe-selection principles for reliably estimating induced decision region inheritance. Across 770 source-suspect pairs drawn from 56 public checkpoints and spanning diverse model-weight transformations, Stemma achieves 0.967 AUC and 87.8% TPR at 1% FPR, substantially outperforming four representative baselines. It further achieves 0.995 AUC and 93.5% TPR at 1% FPR on 1,260 pairs covering 91 deployment instances, demonstrating robustness to diverse inference-time deployment settings.
Implicit Identity Technologies for LLMs: Fingerprinting and Watermarking across Datasets, Models, and Generated Content
This paper presents a survey and taxonomy of LLM fingerprinting and watermarking for identity, ownership verification, provenance, and generated-content attribution. Large language models (LLMs) require substantial investments in data, computation, and expertise, and are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings, making it critical to protect LLM-related assets and trace their origins. Existing work has rapidly expanded across dataset provenance, model ownership, and generated-content detection, but the field remains fragmented: fingerprinting and watermarking are often used inconsistently, and methods are typically studied within isolated asset-specific settings. To address this gap, we introduce implicit identity as a unifying abstraction for verifiable but not directly observable identity signals in LLM systems. We distinguish fingerprinting as non-intrusive identity derived from intrinsic characteristics, and watermarking as intrusive identity deliberately embedded into data, models, or generated content. We then propose a lifecycle-based taxonomy that organises techniques across datasets, models, and generated content, and further separates them by verification semantics: similarity-based attribution and keyed verification. Finally, we establish an evaluation framework centred on identifiability, robustness, and deployability, summarising representative metrics under realistic access and transformation regimes. By unifying terminology, lifecycle stages, and evaluation objectives, this survey provides a structured foundation for studying LLM identity technologies and for developing more reliable mechanisms for asset protection and provenance.
OriginBlame: Record- and Token-Level Data Provenance for AI Training Datasets
When a data contributor requests removal, model trainers face a practical gap: unlearning algorithms require a forget set, yet no tool can locate which training records belong to a given author. Existing provenance systems operate at file or dataset level, forcing catastrophic over-deletion. We present ob, a record- and token-level data provenance system that propagates author identity through data processing pipelines and resolves revocation requests into precise forget sets via deterministic queries. Evaluation on 219,555 Wikipedia pages demonstrates that record-level provenance eliminates dataset-level over-deletion (from 101x to 1.3x), while integration adds 1.3-4.0% throughput overhead (HuggingFace) and 2.1-19.0% (Datatrove) on wiki data. On a 1.7B model, provenance-based forget sets improve unlearning by 42% over random baselines.
Identifying AI Web Scrapers Using Canary Tokens
From pre-training to query-time augmentation, web-scraped data helps to improve the quality and contextual relevancy of content generated by large language models (LLMs). However, large-scale web scraping to feed LLMs can affect site stability and raise legal, privacy, or ethics concerns. If website owners wish to limit LLM-related web scraping on their site, due to these or other concerns, they may turn to scraper access control mechanisms like the Robots Exclusion Protocol. To be most effective, such mechanisms require site owners to first identify the scrapers that they wish to restrict (e.g., via User-Agent strings). Existing mechanisms to identify LLM-related scrapers rely on voluntary disclosure by companies, one-off experiments by researchers, or crowd-sourced reports -- methods that are neither reliable nor scalable. This paper proposes a novel technique for accurately and automatically inferring LLM-related scrapers. We host dynamic websites that serve unique canary tokens to each visiting scraper, then prompt LLMs for information about our sites. If an LLM consistently generates outputs containing tokens unique to a scraper, it provides evidence of exposure to that scraper. Via experiments across 22 production LLM systems, we demonstrate that our approach can reliably identify which scrapers feed which LLM, including several that are not publicly known or disclosed by the companies. Our approach provides a promising avenue for unprivileged third parties to infer which scrapers serve data to which LLMs, potentially enabling better control over unwanted scraping.
TextSeal: A Localized LLM Watermark for Provenance & Distillation Protection
We introduce TextSeal, a state-of-the-art watermark for large language models. Building on Gumbel-max sampling, TextSeal introduces dual-key generation to restore output diversity, along with entropy-weighted scoring and multi-region localization for improved detection. It supports serving optimizations such as speculative decoding and multi-token prediction, and does not add any inference overhead. TextSeal strictly dominates baselines like SynthID-text in detection strength and is robust to dilution, maintaining confident localized detection even in heavily mixed human/AI documents. The scheme is theoretically distortion-free, and evaluation across reasoning benchmarks confirms that it preserves downstream performance; while a multilingual human evaluation (6000 A/B comparisons, 5 languages) shows no perceptible quality difference. Beyond its use for provenance detection, TextSeal is also ``radioactive'': its watermark signal transfers through model distillation, enabling detection of unauthorized use.
TRACER: Verifiable Generative Provenance for Multimodal Tool-Using Agents
Multimodal large language models increasingly solve vision-centric tasks by calling external tools for visual inspection, OCR, retrieval, calculation, and multi-step reasoning. Current tool-using agents usually expose the executed tool trajectory and the final answer, but they rarely specify which tool observation supports each generated claim. We call this missing claim-level dependency structure the provenance gap. The gap makes tool use hard to verify and hard to optimize, because useful evidence, redundant exploration, and unsupported reasoning are mixed in the same trajectory. We introduce TRACER, a framework for verifiable generative provenance in multimodal tool-using agents. Instead of adding citations after generation, TRACER generates each answer sentence together with a structured provenance record that identifies the supporting tool turn, evidence unit, and semantic support relation. Its relation space contains Quotation, Compression, and Inference, covering direct reuse, faithful condensation, and grounded derivation. TRACER verifies each record through schema checking, tool-turn alignment, source authenticity, and relation rationality, and then converts verified provenance into traceability constraints and provenance-derived local credit for reinforcement learning. We further construct TRACE-Bench, a benchmark for sentence-level provenance reconstruction from coarse multimodal tool trajectories. On TRACE-Bench, simply adding tools often introduces noise. With Qwen3-VL-8B, TRACER reaches 78.23% answer accuracy and 95.72% summary accuracy, outperforming the strongest closed-source tool-augmented baseline by 23.80 percentage points. Compared with tool-only supervised fine-tuning, it also reduces total test-set tool calls from 4949 to 3486. These results show that reliable multimodal tool reasoning depends on provenance-aware use of observations, not on more tool calls alone.
DataDignity: Training Data Attribution for Large Language Models
Auditing language-model outputs often requires more than judging correctness: an auditor may need to identify which source document most likely supports the knowledge expressed in a response. We study this as pinpoint provenance: given a prompt, a target-model response, and a candidate corpus, rank the documents that best support the response. We introduce FakeWiki, a controlled benchmark of 3,537 fabricated Wikipedia-style articles designed to preserve ground-truth provenance while weakening lexical shortcuts. FakeWiki includes QA probes, source-preserving paraphrases, retro-generated variants, hard anti-documents that remain topically similar while removing answer-critical facts, and five query conditions: clean prompting plus four jailbreak-inspired transformations. We evaluate seven retrieval baselines, a training-free activation-steering retrieval-fusion method, SteerFuse, and a supervised contrastive provenance ranker, ScoringModel. ScoringModel maps response and document features into a shared space and is trained with InfoNCE using in-batch, retrieval-mined, and anti-document negatives. Across nine open-weight instruction-tuned LLMs and five query conditions, ScoringModel improves mean Recall@10 from 35.0 for the strongest retrieval baseline to 52.2, without inference-time fusion, and wins 41/45 model-by-condition cells. SteerFuse is usually second-best despite requiring no supervised training, showing that activation-space evidence can efficiently complement text retrieval. On jailbreak-inspired transformed queries, ScoringModel improves Recall@10 by 15.7 points on average over the best baseline. Overall, our work shows that robust training data attribution requires evaluation settings that separate true answer support from topical or lexical resemblance.
AttnDiff: Attention-based Differential Fingerprinting for Large Language Models
Protecting the intellectual property of open-weight large language models (LLMs) requires verifying whether a suspect model is derived from a victim model despite common laundering operations such as fine-tuning (including PPO/DPO), pruning/compression, and model merging. We propose AttnDiff, a data-efficient white-box framework that extracts fingerprints from models via intrinsic information-routing behavior. AttnDiff probes minimally edited prompt pairs that induce controlled semantic conflicts, captures differential attention patterns, summarizes them with compact spectral descriptors, and compares models using CKA. Across Llama-2/3 and Qwen2.5 (3B--14B) and additional open-source families, it yields high similarity for related derivatives while separating unrelated model families (e.g., vs.\ with probes). With 5--60 multi-domain probes, it supports practical provenance verification and accountability.
DebugLM: Learning Traceable Training Data Provenance for LLMs
Large language models (LLMs) are trained through multi-stage pipelines over heterogeneous data sources, yet developers lack a principled way to pinpoint the specific data responsible for an observed behavior. This lack of observability reduces debugging to reactive patching and makes failures prone to recur under distribution shift or subsequent model updates. To address this limitation, we propose DebugLM, a framework that equips LLMs with built-in data provenance, enabling them to explicitly trace the origins of their behaviors to specific training data sources. Specifically, the model learns to associate its responses with unique provenance tags that indicate the responsible dataset, empowering developers to precisely identify where undesirable behaviors are learned. Building on this capability, DebugLM further supports targeted test-time remediation, enabling developers to selectively trigger targeted refusal for specified data sources without retraining or modifying model parameters. Experiments demonstrate that DebugLM provides accurate behavior tracing in multi-stage training pipelines and effective test-time remediation while preserving the general utility of the model.
When Only the Final Text Survives: Implicit Execution Tracing for Multi-Agent Auditing
When a multi-agent system produces an incorrect or harmful answer, who is accountable if execution logs and agent identifiers are unavailable? In practice, generated content is often detached from its execution environment due to privacy or system boundaries, leaving the final text as the only auditable artifact. Existing attribution methods rely on full execution traces and thus become ineffective in such metadata-deprived settings. We propose Implicit Execution Tracing (IET), a provenance-by-design framework that shifts attribution from post-hoc inference to built-in instrumentation. Rather than inferring provenance after the fact, IET embeds agent-specific, key-conditioned statistical signals into the token generation process at generation time, turning the output text into a self-verifying provenance record. An offline auditor, holding a verification registry that maps each agent to its key, then recovers segment-level provenance - segment boundaries and per-segment agent attribution - from the final text alone without access to execution logs or private traces. Experiments across diverse multi-agent coordination settings demonstrate that IET achieves accurate segment-level attribution and reliable transition recovery under identity removal, boundary corruption, and privacy-preserving redaction, while maintaining generation quality. These results show that embedding provenance into generation provides a practical foundation for accountability in multi-agent language systems under metadata loss.
SELF: A Robust Singular Value and Eigenvalue Approach for LLM Fingerprinting
Safeguarding the Intellectual Property (IP) of Large Language Models (LLMs) against model theft represents a critical challenge in contemporary AI research. Although fingerprinting is essential for establishing forensic evidence for model derivation, existing methods are susceptible to false claim attacks, weight manipulations, or high false positive rates, undermining their utility. To overcome these limitations, we propose SELF, \rev{a novel intrinsic weight-based fingerprinting scheme tailored for robust IP forensics via adversarial model lineage verification}. SELF eliminates dependency on input and inherently resists false claims, achieving robust \rev{provenance detection} through unique, scalable and transformation-invariant fingerprint extraction via singular value and eigenvalue decomposition of LLM attention weights. Experimental results demonstrate that SELF maintains high IP infringement detection accuracy while significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in reducing false positives and showing strong robustness against various downstream modifications, including quantization, pruning, and fine-tuning attacks. Our code is available at https://github.com/HanxiuZhang/SELF_v4.
Epistemic Substitution: How Grokipedia's AI-Generated Encyclopedia Restructures Authority
For more than two decades, Wikipedia has represented a decentralized, human-curated model of encyclopedic knowledge production. The emergence of AI-generated encyclopedias, such as Grokipedia, raises a fundamental question: do human- and AI-curated knowledge systems rely on the same foundations of epistemic authority? We examine this question through a comparative analysis of 1,000 matched Wikipedia--Grokipedia article pairs, comprising nearly 600,000 citation instances. Using an eight-category classification scheme, we construct the epistemic profiles of articles to examine the institutional composition of their cited sources. Our findings reveal substantial differences in sourcing practices. Grokipedia relies proportionally less on academic and journalistic sources and more on user-generated content and NGO and think-tank publications. These differences persist across broad topic domains, although their magnitude varies by subject. We also find that Grokipedia adds citations approximately linearly as articles grow, whereas Wikipedia exhibits greater variation in citation density. Together, these findings suggest a shift in the institutional sources invoked to justify encyclopedic claims, which we characterize as epistemic substitution. For the same topics, the two encyclopedias rest on different institutional sources. Our findings underscore the importance of systematic, ongoing audits of information provenance for accountability in generative knowledge systems.
AuthRank: Scoring Source Credibility to Counter Poisoning in CTI LLM Pipelines
Large Language Model (LLM) pipelines have become essential for processing Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) to quickly extract updated threat information from open source feeds and reports for real time processing. However, these pipelines are susceptible to poisoning attacks, and previously proposed defenses can fail for CTI contexts as cyber threat information is often completely novel, and attackers can easily mimic the stylistic conventions. We propose that the robustness of LLM pipelines can be improved by applying source credibility algorithms on document corpora, using PageRank as an example. We introduce AuthRank, a credibility score computed from citation networks built using explicit citations, LLM-inferred citations, and claim-level entailment, enhanced with time decay and author credibility. Our experiments on the standardized MS MARCO dataset demonstrate improved accuracy under poisoning, and we show proof-of-concept performance on CTI documents and feeds.
Beyond Public Access in LLM Pre-Training Data
Using a legally obtained dataset of 34 copyrighted O'Reilly Media books (13,962 paragraphs), we apply the DE-COP membership inference attack to test whether OpenAI models show recognition of non-public (pay-walled) content they were not licensed to train on. Our main contribution is examining non-public books, which allows us to consider potential access violations and not just training inclusion. Our results suggest that GPT-4o, OpenAI's more recent and capable model in our sample, exhibits patterns consistent with recognition of non-public books, with an AUROC score of 0.82 (95% bootstrapped CI: 0.60-0.96) -- where above 50% is better than random chance. GPT-3.5 Turbo (trained two years prior) and the smaller GPT-4o Mini both score near chance recognition on non-public data (0.54 and 0.56, respectively). Results are robust to independent paraphrasers (Gemma and Qwen) and leave-one-book-out sensitivity analyses. We also test both GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini, with the same October 2023 training cutoff date, to ensure the model is not simply identifying language shifts over time. These findings support disclosure requirements for pre-training data provenance and formal licensing markets for training content. Results remain preliminary given the small book sample, possible contamination of post-cutoff controls, and differences across models in size, architecture, and training composition.