Gerhard Wunder
Author directory2026
Robust Text Watermarking for Large Language Models via Dual Semantic Embeddings
Jonas Schäfer | Cezary Pilaszewicz | Gerhard Wunder
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Jonas Schäfer | Cezary Pilaszewicz | Gerhard Wunder
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
This work presents Dual-Embedding Watermarking (DEW), a semantic watermarking scheme for large language models (LLMs) that leverages contextual and token-level embeddings to enhance robustness against paraphrasing and translation. DEW utilizes a signal-processing methodology, applying algebraic vector-space operations to token and context embeddings to derive a watermark signal that degrades gracefully under semantic shifts. The method obfuscates the watermark by projecting embedding vectors through pseudo-random matrices seeded with a secret key. Experimental results show that dual-embedding watermarking can offer state-of-the-art robustness, particularly against translation, while incurring relatively low computational overhead compared with other semantic schemes. At lower watermark strength, DEW also maintains competitive text quality, suggesting that dual-embedding signals provide a promising substrate for robust semantic watermarking.
2025
Where Confabulation Lives: Latent Feature Discovery in LLMs
Thibaud Ardoin | Yi Cai | Gerhard Wunder
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Thibaud Ardoin | Yi Cai | Gerhard Wunder
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Hallucination remains a critical failure mode of large language models (LLMs), undermining their trustworthiness in real-world applications. In this work, we focus on confabulation, a foundational aspect of hallucination where the model fabricates facts about unknown entities. We introduce a targeted dataset designed to isolate and analyze this behavior across diverse prompt types. Using this dataset, and building on recent progress in interpreting LLM internals, we extract latent directions associated with confabulation using sparse projections. A simple vector-based steering method demonstrates that these directions can modulate model behavior with minimal disruption, shedding light on the inner representations that drive factual and non-factual output. Our findings contribute to a deeper mechanistic understanding of LLMs and pave the way toward more trustworthy and controllable generation. We release the code and dataset at https://github.com/Thibaud-Ardoin/where-confabulation-lives.