SemField: A Simple, Linear, Continuous, yet Robust Semantic Watermark

Abstract

The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitates reliable watermarking techniques to identify AI-generated text and ensure appropriate attribution. While token-based watermarks are vulnerable to paraphrasing, a central challenge for semantic watermarking is to turn sentence meanings into a stable, well-calibrated document-level signal. To this end, we introduce SemField, a simple, training-free semantic watermark that embeds a continuous, linear signal directly into the sentence embedding space. Using a shared secret key to define a specific Gaussian direction, SemField iteratively evaluates candidate sentences and selects those that maximize the alignment of the cumulative document aggregate with this targeted direction. We also propose SemField-PL, a polarity-locked variant that first determines the optimal orientation from the initial sentence and continuously reinforces it throughout the generation process. The document-level aggregated formulation guarantees exact invariance to sentence reordering and provides theoretical bounds against structural tampering, such as sentence insertion and deletion. Lastly, with extensive evaluations across three models, we demonstrate that both variants outperform 12 recent baselines. Across clean detection and four paraphrasing attacks, both variants achieve a mean True Positive Rate (TPR) of 88.2% to 90.4% at a 1% False Positive Rate (FPR), all while maintaining comparable perplexity and naturalness as human-generated content. We open-source our implementation at https://github.com/declare-lab/SemField