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Data Provenance Auditing of Fine-Tuned Large Language Models with a Text-Preserving Technique

Yanming Li (PETSCRAFT) C\'edric Eichler (PETSCRAFT) Nicolas Anciaux (PETSCRAFT) Alexandra Bensamoun (UC3M) Lorena Gonzalez Manzano (UC3M) Seifeddine Ghozzi (ENSTA)
Sep 2026
Artificial Intelligence Cybersecurity

Abstract

We propose a system for marking sensitive or copyrighted texts to detect their use in fine-tuning large language models under black-box access with statistical guarantees. Our method builds digital ``marks'' using invisible Unicode characters organized into (``cue'', ``reply'') pairs. During an audit, prompts containing only ``cue'' fragments are issued to trigger regurgitation of the corresponding ``reply'', indicating document usage. To control false positives, we compare against held-out counterfactual marks and apply a ranking test, yielding a verifiable bound on the false positive rate. Empirically, we obtain a true positive rate of 96.7% at 0% false positive rate and reply regurgitation rates exceeding 28% per document with only 40 (4%) watermarked documents. The approach is minimally invasive, scalable across many sources, robust to standard processing pipelines, and achieves high detection power even when marked data is a small fraction of the fine-tuning corpus.

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