arXiv:2510.13829v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance rapidly, reliable governance tools have become critical. Publicly verifiable watermarking is particularly essential for fostering a trustworthy AI ecosystem. A central challenge persists: balancing text quality against detection robustness. Recent studies have sought to navigate this trade-off by leveraging signals from model output distributions (e.g., token-level entropy); however, their reliance on these model-specific signals presents a significant barrier to public verification, as the detection process requires access to the logits of the underlying model. We introduce STELA, a novel framework that aligns watermark strength with the linguistic degrees of freedom inherent in language. STELA dynamically modulates the signal using part-of-speech (POS) n-gram-modeled linguistic indeterminacy, weakening it in grammatically constrained contexts to preserve quality and strengthen it in contexts with greater linguistic flexibility to enhance detectability. Our detector operates without access to any model logits, thus facilitating publicly verifiable detection. Through extensive experiments on typologically diverse languages-analytic English, isolating Chinese, and agglutinative Korean-we show that STELA surpasses prior methods in detection robustness. Our code is available at https://github.com/Shinwoo-Park/stela_watermark.

arXiv:2604.01604v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As safety concerns around large language models (LLMs) grow, understanding the internal mechanisms underlying refusal behavior has become increasingly important. Recent work has studied this behavior by identifying internal features associated with refusal and manipulating them to induce compliance with harmful requests. However, existing refusal feature selection methods rely on how strongly features activate on harmful prompts, which tends to capture superficial signals rather than the causal factors underlying the refusal decision. We propose CRaFT, a circuit-guided refusal feature selection framework that ranks features by their influence on the model's refusal-compliance decision using prompts near the refusal boundary. On Gemma-3-1B-it, CRaFT improves attack success rate (ASR) from 6.7% to 48.2% and outperforms baseline methods across multiple jailbreak benchmarks. These results suggest that circuit influence is a more reliable criterion than activation magnitude for identifying features that causally mediate refusal behavior.

arXiv:2510.10987v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The promise of LLM watermarking rests on a core assumption that a specific watermark proves authorship by a specific model. We demonstrate that this assumption is dangerously flawed. We introduce the threat of watermark spoofing, a sophisticated attack that allows a malicious model to generate text containing the authentic-looking watermark of a trusted, victim model. This enables the seamless misattribution of harmful content, such as disinformation, to reputable sources. The key to our attack is repurposing watermark radioactivity, the unintended inheritance of data patterns during fine-tuning, from a discoverable trait into an attack vector. By distilling knowledge from a watermarked teacher model, our framework allows an attacker to steal and replicate the watermarking signal of the victim model. This work reveals a critical security gap in text authorship verification and calls for a paradigm shift towards technologies capable of distinguishing authentic watermarks from expertly imitated ones. Our code is available at https://github.com/hsannn/ditto.git.