@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2025-certified,
title = "Certified Mitigation of Worst-Case {LLM} Copyright Infringement",
author = "Zhang, Jingyu and
Yu, Jiacan and
Marone, Marc and
Van Durme, Benjamin and
Khashabi, Daniel",
editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos and
Chakraborty, Tanmoy and
Rose, Carolyn and
Peng, Violet",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = nov,
year = "2025",
address = "Suzhou, China",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1784/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1784",
pages = "35174--35195",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
abstract = "The exposure of large language models (LLMs) to copyrighted material during pre-training raises concerns about unintentional copyright infringement post deployment. This has driven the development of ``copyright takedown'' methods{---}post-training approaches aimed at preventing models from generating content substantially similar to copyrighted ones. While current mitigation approaches are somewhat effective for average-case risks, we demonstrate that they overlook worst-case copyright risks exhibited by the existence of long, verbatim quotes from copyrighted sources. We propose BloomScrub, a remarkably simple yet highly effective inference-time approach that provides certified copyright takedown. Our method repeatedly interleaves quote detection with rewriting techniques to transform potentially infringing segments. By leveraging efficient data sketches (Bloom filters), our approach enables scalable copyright screening{---}even for large-scale real-world corpora. When quotes beyond a length threshold cannot be removed, the system can abstain from responding, offering certified risk reduction. Experimental results show that BloomScrub reduces infringement risk, preserves utility, and accommodates different levels of enforcement stringency with adaptive abstention. Our results suggest that lightweight, inference-time methods can be surprisingly effective for copyright prevention."
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="zhang-etal-2025-certified">
<titleInfo>
<title>Certified Mitigation of Worst-Case LLM Copyright Infringement</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jingyu</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zhang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jiacan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Yu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Marc</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Marone</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Benjamin</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Van Durme</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Daniel</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Khashabi</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2025-11</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Christos</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Christodoulopoulos</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Tanmoy</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Chakraborty</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Carolyn</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Rose</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Violet</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Peng</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Suzhou, China</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
<identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-332-6</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>The exposure of large language models (LLMs) to copyrighted material during pre-training raises concerns about unintentional copyright infringement post deployment. This has driven the development of “copyright takedown” methods—post-training approaches aimed at preventing models from generating content substantially similar to copyrighted ones. While current mitigation approaches are somewhat effective for average-case risks, we demonstrate that they overlook worst-case copyright risks exhibited by the existence of long, verbatim quotes from copyrighted sources. We propose BloomScrub, a remarkably simple yet highly effective inference-time approach that provides certified copyright takedown. Our method repeatedly interleaves quote detection with rewriting techniques to transform potentially infringing segments. By leveraging efficient data sketches (Bloom filters), our approach enables scalable copyright screening—even for large-scale real-world corpora. When quotes beyond a length threshold cannot be removed, the system can abstain from responding, offering certified risk reduction. Experimental results show that BloomScrub reduces infringement risk, preserves utility, and accommodates different levels of enforcement stringency with adaptive abstention. Our results suggest that lightweight, inference-time methods can be surprisingly effective for copyright prevention.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">zhang-etal-2025-certified</identifier>
<identifier type="doi">10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1784</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1784/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2025-11</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>35174</start>
<end>35195</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Certified Mitigation of Worst-Case LLM Copyright Infringement
%A Zhang, Jingyu
%A Yu, Jiacan
%A Marone, Marc
%A Van Durme, Benjamin
%A Khashabi, Daniel
%Y Christodoulopoulos, Christos
%Y Chakraborty, Tanmoy
%Y Rose, Carolyn
%Y Peng, Violet
%S Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2025
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Suzhou, China
%@ 979-8-89176-332-6
%F zhang-etal-2025-certified
%X The exposure of large language models (LLMs) to copyrighted material during pre-training raises concerns about unintentional copyright infringement post deployment. This has driven the development of “copyright takedown” methods—post-training approaches aimed at preventing models from generating content substantially similar to copyrighted ones. While current mitigation approaches are somewhat effective for average-case risks, we demonstrate that they overlook worst-case copyright risks exhibited by the existence of long, verbatim quotes from copyrighted sources. We propose BloomScrub, a remarkably simple yet highly effective inference-time approach that provides certified copyright takedown. Our method repeatedly interleaves quote detection with rewriting techniques to transform potentially infringing segments. By leveraging efficient data sketches (Bloom filters), our approach enables scalable copyright screening—even for large-scale real-world corpora. When quotes beyond a length threshold cannot be removed, the system can abstain from responding, offering certified risk reduction. Experimental results show that BloomScrub reduces infringement risk, preserves utility, and accommodates different levels of enforcement stringency with adaptive abstention. Our results suggest that lightweight, inference-time methods can be surprisingly effective for copyright prevention.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1784
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1784/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1784
%P 35174-35195
Markdown (Informal)
[Certified Mitigation of Worst-Case LLM Copyright Infringement](https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1784/) (Zhang et al., EMNLP 2025)
ACL
- Jingyu Zhang, Jiacan Yu, Marc Marone, Benjamin Van Durme, and Daniel Khashabi. 2025. Certified Mitigation of Worst-Case LLM Copyright Infringement. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 35174–35195, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.