Jungmin Lee Hanyang Universty, Peizhuo Lv, Yeonjoon Lee Hanyang University
As Large Language Model applications (LLM apps) become widespread, system prompts that determine app behavior are increasingly regarded as intellectual property, raising concerns about leakage. Recent studies show that this threat is no longer theoretical, revealing the prevalence of cloned apps replicating system prompts from others on real-world platforms. These clones pose risks of copyright infringement and malicious misuse, highlighting the need for early and reliable detection. In this paper, we propose PROMPRINT, a novel fingerprinting approach for detecting cloned LLM apps without exposing their system prompts. Motivated by the insight that different system prompts yield distinct responses to the same query, PROMPRINT optimizes queries that induce the LLM to generate a specific first token associated with the given system prompt, resulting in distinctive query–first-token pairs. Experiments on four instruction-tuned LLMs show that generated pairs effectively identify the corresponding system prompts, achieving over 74% probability of generating the target token while remaining below 2.2% on average under other prompts. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our fingerprinting remains robust to partial system prompt modifications and effective under the injection of adversarial instructions.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Peizhuo Lv, Ruihua Zhou, Yunpeng Li Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ruigang Liang Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xingshuo Han, XiaoFeng Wang Nanyang Technological University, Wei Dong Nanyang Technological University, Yuling Liu Institute of Information Engineering，CAS
Reasoning-enhanced large language models rely on intermediate reasoning signals to solve complex, multi-step tasks, making reasoning behavior a valuable form of intellectual property. Meanwhile, knowledge distillation enables an adversary to replicate this behavior in a realistic black-box setting by repeatedly querying a deployed model on a target domain and training a local student to imitate its outputs, including reasoning traces. Existing LLM watermarks primarily operate on surface text and decoding-time token biases, and thus fail to provide reliable attribution of reasoning behavior once it is transferred through knowledge distillation. ReasMark entangles the watermark with the target-domain input distribution by selecting watermark tokens from high-frequency prompts, so distillation queries naturally activate it. It then embeds the watermark by score-conditioned losses that create a detectable reasoning-length gap for black-box verification. Comprehensive experiments across multiple LLMs, datasets, and distillation settings demonstrate that ReasMark consistently outperforms existing baselines while preserving task utility.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表