ImF: Implicit Fingerprint for Large Language Models

Abstract

Training large language models (LLMs) is resource-intensive and expensive, making protecting intellectual property (IP) for LLMs crucial. Recently, embedding fingerprints into LLMs has emerged as a prevalent method for establishing model ownership. However, existing fingerprinting techniques typically embed identifiable patterns with weak semantic coherence, resulting in fingerprints that significantly differ from the natural question-answering (QA) behavior inherent to LLMs. This discrepancy undermines the stealthiness of the embedded fingerprints and makes them vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we first demonstrate the critical vulnerability of existing fingerprint embedding methods by introducing a novel adversarial attack named Generation Revision Intervention (GRI) attack. GRI attack exploits the semantic fragility of current fingerprinting methods, effectively erasing fingerprints by disrupting their weakly correlated semantic structures. Our empirical evaluation highlights that traditional fingerprinting approaches are significantly compromised by the GRI attack, revealing severe limitations in their robustness under realistic adversarial conditions. To advance the state-of-the-art in model fingerprinting, we propose a novel model fingerprint paradigm called Implicit Fingerprints (ImF). ImF leverages steganography techniques to subtly embed ownership information within natural texts, subsequently using Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to construct semantically coherent and contextually natural QA pairs. This design ensures that fingerprints seamlessly integrate with the standard model behavior, remaining indistinguishable from regular outputs and substantially reducing the risk of accidental triggering and targeted removal. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of ImF on 15 diverse LLMs, spanning different architectures and varying scales.