Feng Wei
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2026
The Mark Fades: Adaptive Evolutionary Paraphrase-based Attack against LLM Watermarks
Yusheng Zhao | Jian Zhao | Tianle Zhang | Feng Wei | Xuelong Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yusheng Zhao | Jian Zhao | Tianle Zhang | Feng Wei | Xuelong Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
While LLM watermarking is essential for machine- generated content identification, existing paraphrase-based attacks struggle to balance watermark removal efficacy with text quality. We propose TSAPA, a training-free evolutionary framework that models watermark removal as a constrained multi-objective optimization problem. By leveraging genetic algorithms to navigate the Pareto front, TSAPA utilizes a Pseudo-Log-Likelihood (PLL)-guided mutation to precisely target and modify watermark-carrying tokens. Experiments on Qwen3 series (1.7B/8B/32B) across multiple watermark schemes show that TSAPA achieves over 90% attack success rate (ASR) while maintaining high text semantic fidelity, significantly outperforming baselines methods. This work exposes critical vulnerabilities in current watermarks and provides a new perspective for robust evaluation.