@inproceedings{fei-etal-2025-semantic,
title = "Your Semantic-Independent Watermark is Fragile: A Semantic Perturbation Attack against {E}aa{S} Watermark",
author = "Fei, Zekun and
Yi, Biao and
Geng, Jianing and
Ruiqi, He and
Nie, Lihai and
Liu, Zheli",
editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos and
Chakraborty, Tanmoy and
Rose, Carolyn and
Peng, Violet",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025",
month = nov,
year = "2025",
address = "Suzhou, China",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.192/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.192",
pages = "3600--3614",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-335-7",
abstract = "Embedding-as-a-Service (EaaS) has emerged as a successful business pattern but faces significant challenges related to various forms of copyright infringement, particularly the API misuse and model extraction attacks. Various studies have proposed backdoor-based watermarking schemes to protect the copyright of EaaS services. In this paper, we reveal that previous watermarking schemes possess semantic-independent characteristics and propose the Semantic Perturbation Attack (SPA). Our theoretical and experimental analysis demonstrates that this semantic-independent nature makes current watermarking schemes vulnerable to adaptive attacks that exploit semantic perturbation tests to bypass watermark verification. Extensive experimental results across multiple datasets demonstrate that the True Positive Rate (TPR) for identifying watermarked samples under SPA can reach up to more than 95{\%}, rendering watermarks ineffective while maintaining the high utility of the embeddings. In addition, we discuss current potential defense strategies to mitigate SPA. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zk4-ps/EaaS-Embedding-Watermark."
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Your Semantic-Independent Watermark is Fragile: A Semantic Perturbation Attack against EaaS Watermark
%A Fei, Zekun
%A Yi, Biao
%A Geng, Jianing
%A Ruiqi, He
%A Nie, Lihai
%A Liu, Zheli
%Y Christodoulopoulos, Christos
%Y Chakraborty, Tanmoy
%Y Rose, Carolyn
%Y Peng, Violet
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
%D 2025
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Suzhou, China
%@ 979-8-89176-335-7
%F fei-etal-2025-semantic
%X Embedding-as-a-Service (EaaS) has emerged as a successful business pattern but faces significant challenges related to various forms of copyright infringement, particularly the API misuse and model extraction attacks. Various studies have proposed backdoor-based watermarking schemes to protect the copyright of EaaS services. In this paper, we reveal that previous watermarking schemes possess semantic-independent characteristics and propose the Semantic Perturbation Attack (SPA). Our theoretical and experimental analysis demonstrates that this semantic-independent nature makes current watermarking schemes vulnerable to adaptive attacks that exploit semantic perturbation tests to bypass watermark verification. Extensive experimental results across multiple datasets demonstrate that the True Positive Rate (TPR) for identifying watermarked samples under SPA can reach up to more than 95%, rendering watermarks ineffective while maintaining the high utility of the embeddings. In addition, we discuss current potential defense strategies to mitigate SPA. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zk4-ps/EaaS-Embedding-Watermark.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.192
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.192/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.192
%P 3600-3614
Markdown (Informal)
[Your Semantic-Independent Watermark is Fragile: A Semantic Perturbation Attack against EaaS Watermark](https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.192/) (Fei et al., Findings 2025)
ACL