AgentMark: Utility-Preserving Behavioral Watermarking for Agents
Kaibo Huang, Jin Tan, Yukun Wei, Wanling Li, Zipei Zhang, Hui Tian Huaqiao University, Zhongliang Yang Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Linna Zhou Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
原文摘要
LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed to autonomously solve complex tasks, raising urgent needs for IP protection and regulatory provenance. While content watermarking effectively attributes LLM-generated outputs, it fails to directly identify the high-level planning behaviors (e.g., tool and subgoal choices) that govern multi-step execution. Critically, watermarking at the planning-behavior layer faces unique challenges: minor distributional deviations in decision-making can compound during long-term agent operation, degrading utility, and many agents operate as black boxes that are difficult to intervene in directly. To bridge this gap, we propose AgentMark, a behavioral watermarking framework that embeds multi-bit identifiers into planning decisions while preserving utility. It operates by eliciting an explicit behavior distribution from the agent and applying distribution-preserving conditional sampling, enabling deployment under black-box APIs while remaining compatible with action-layer content watermarking. Experiments across embodied, tool-use, and social environments demonstrate practical multi-bit capacity, robust recovery from partial logs, and utility preservation. Code is available at https://github.com/Tooooa/AgentMark.
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表