arXiv cs.CLPaper
Watermark Basins: Black-Box Detection of Distilled LLMs
Model distillation is a real threat to proprietary models, and existing token-level watermark detection fails when students are trained at low temperature. This paper's insight about geometric basins is novel and the black-box approach means watermarks could survive distillation attempts. For model providers: this changes the calculus of watermarking strategy. For researchers building defense systems: test this before assuming your distilled model is undetectable.