DenMark: Robust Semantic Watermarking for Diffusion Language Models
Mirrored from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2609.14257 (cs)
[Submitted on 13 Sep 2026]
Title:DenMark: Robust Semantic Watermarking for Diffusion Language Models
Authors:Tianhao Ma, Weihao Xuan, Dong-Dong Wu, Farshid Nooshi, Takashi Ishida, Gang Niu, Naoto Yokoya, Masashi Sugiyama
View a PDF of the paper titled DenMark: Robust Semantic Watermarking for Diffusion Language Models, by Tianhao Ma and 7 other authors
View PDF
HTML (experimental)
Abstract:Semantic text watermarks encode signals in meaning rather than surface token choices, offering robustness to paraphrasing and other semantic-preserving edits. Existing semantic watermarking methods are primarily designed for autoregressive language models (ARLMs), where completed candidate units can be generated and scored before generation proceeds. This paradigm does not naturally extend to diffusion language models (DLMs), where semantic units remain incomplete during intermediate denoising steps and tokens may be updated in flexible orders. We propose DenMark, a semantic watermarking framework that injects key-dependent signals directly into the DLM denoising process. DenMark partitions the output into fixed token regions and uses temporary rollouts as semantic lookahead: conditional completions estimate the eventual semantics of an incomplete region, enabling DenMark to select local updates with higher estimated semantic watermark scores. Repeating this procedure across denoising steps progressively accumulates watermark evidence in the final output. For detection, DenMark uses calibrated scanning over candidate unit sizes to remain robust to boundary shifts introduced by semantic attacks. Across four DLMs, three datasets, and four semantic attacks, DenMark achieves the best results across all reported detection metrics in all 48 backbone-dataset-attack combinations. These results demonstrate that DenMark provides an effective mechanism for robust semantic watermarking in DLMs.
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2609.14257 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2609.14257v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.14257
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Full-text links:
Access Paper:
- View PDF
- HTML (experimental)
- TeX Source
View a PDF of the paper titled DenMark: Robust Semantic Watermarking for Diffusion Language Models, by Tianhao Ma and 7 other authors
References & Citations
Loading...
Bookmark
Bibliographic Tools
Code, Data, Media
Demos
Related Papers
About arXivLabs
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos
Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Recommenders and Search Tools
Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.