← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2610.36432 · v1
No Tokenizer, Still a Gap: Cross-Lingual Fairness of Homoglyph and Invisible-Character Watermarking
首次提交 2026-10-27 08:27
版本更新 2026-10-27 08:27
雷达观测 2026-10-29 00:35
摘要
Homoglyph and invisible-character watermarks are edit-based watermarks. Instead of changing how a model generates text, they hide a signal in the text after it is written. They swap some characters for homoglyphs, which look the same, or very similar, but have different Unicode code points, or they insert characters that do not display, all without access to the model that wrote the text. Generation-time watermarks work less well for lower-resourced languages due to how tokenizers split their text. Because they work on individual characters, these watermarks never touch a tokenizer, so we ask whether they escape this gap. Across 40 language varieties in 24 scripts, we measure capacity (the hidden bits each character can carry), how much of it survives routine handling and targeted removal, and how much text a keyed detector needs. Capacity varies 3.3-fold and script accounts for 96\% of that variation. Within Latin script, resource level makes no detectable difference ($ρ=+0.095$, $p=0.78$), but across scripts capacity rises with it ($ρ=+0.54$, 95\% CI $[+0.14,+0.83]$), because lower-resourced languages tend to use scripts with few homoglyphs. Ordinary copy-paste, which strips invisible characters, widens the gap: a detector then needs about 2 code points of English or Persian but 93 of Lao. Removing the tokenizer does not remove the inequity, but instead only changes its source.
作者备注：19 pages
观测到的版本
相邻记录可能跳过中间版本；首次发现 v2 及以上也会标为版本更新。
v1 · 2026-10-27 08:27 · 最新观测版本
No Tokenizer, Still a Gap: Cross-Lingual Fairness of Homoglyph and Invisible-Character Watermarking
Homoglyph and invisible-character watermarks are edit-based watermarks. Instead of changing how a model generates text, they hide a signal in the text after it is written. They swap some characters for homoglyphs, which look the same, or very similar, but have different Unicode code points, or they insert characters that do not display, all without access to the model that wrote the text. Generation-time watermarks work less well for lower-resourced languages due to how tokenizers split their text. Because they work on individual characters, these watermarks never touch a tokenizer, so we ask whether they escape this gap. Across 40 language varieties in 24 scripts, we measure capacity (the hidden bits each character can carry), how much of it survives routine handling and targeted removal, and how much text a keyed detector needs. Capacity varies 3.3-fold and script accounts for 96\% of that variation. Within Latin script, resource level makes no detectable difference ($ρ=+0.095$, $p=0.78$), but across scripts capacity rises with it ($ρ=+0.54$, 95\% CI $[+0.14,+0.83]$), because lower-resourced languages tend to use scripts with few homoglyphs. Ordinary copy-paste, which strips invisible characters, widens the gap: a detector then needs about 2 code points of English or Persian but 93 of Lao. Removing the tokenizer does not remove the inequity, but instead only changes its source.
查看此版本解读 →查看此版本原文 ↗