Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) are valuable intellectual property due to their substantial training and alignment costs, creating a need for reliable ownership verification under black-box access, where a verifier can only query a suspect model and inspect its returned output. Existing trigger–response fingerprints are easy to test but are often weakly coupled with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and can be fragile under paraphrasing or post-hoc model modifications. We propose CoT-Lock, a reasoning-mediated fingerprinting framework that casts ownership verification as a structured conflict-resolution task. CoT-Lock constructs verification queries in which a default semantic constraint is superseded only by a higher-priority meta-override rule, training the model to resolve fingerprint activation through priority-based arbitration. Our primary ownership test is output-only on confidential held-out probes; when reasoning traces are visible, trace-level verification further checks the expected arbitration process. Experiments on representative reasoning architectures show that CoT-Lock achieves stable black-box verification while preserving reasoning ability with minimal performance degradation, low false positives, and improved robustness against paraphrasing, fine-tuning, pruning, and quantization. Our code is available at https://github.com/acang425/CoT-Lock.

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer a compelling alternative to autoregressive models, yet they may expose sensitive training data during denoising. Detecting such usage is challenging because dLLMs lack the efficient one-pass probability decomposition of causal architectures. Existing methods rely on random masking to obtain tractable token-wise detection signals under limited query budgets, but fail to control dependencies among masked tokens. We demonstrate that this token-wise approximation introduces a non-negative structural estimation error, which is theoretically characterized by the cumulative conditional mutual information (CMI) among masked tokens and can obscure subtle memorization signals. This insight suggests that reliable detection requires masked token sets with weak internal dependency. To avoid the prohibitive cost of directly estimating CMI over token combinations, we propose Independent Token Sampling (ITS), a query-efficient framework that uses an attention-derived pairwise dependency proxy to approximate the CMI-aware selection criterion. ITS further incorporates a diversity-promoting strategy to improve token coverage across sampling rounds, yielding aggregated token-wise signals that are less affected by dependency-induced approximation error. Experiments on multiple datasets show that ITS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across different models and datasets, achieving an AUC improvement of 0.18 on the ArXiv dataset while maintaining strong performance under limited query budgets.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating highly fluent textual content. While they offer significant convenience to humans, they also introduce various risks, like phishing and academic dishonesty. Numerous research efforts have been dedicated to developing algorithms for detecting AI-generated text and constructing relevant datasets. However, in the domain of Chinese corpora, challenges remain, including limited model diversity and data homogeneity. To address these issues, we propose C-ReD: a comprehensive Chinese Real-prompt AI-generated text Detection benchmark. Experiments demonstrate that C-ReD not only enables reliable in-domain detection but also supports strong generalization to unseen LLMs and external Chinese datasets—addressing critical gaps in model diversity, domain coverage, and prompt realism that have limited prior Chinese detection benchmarks. We release our resources at https://github.com/HeraldofLight/C-ReD.

Diffusion models (DMs) have recently exhibited impressive generation capability. However, their training generally requires huge computational resources and large-scale datasets. To solve these, recent studies empower DMs with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), yielding retrieval-augmented diffusion models (RDMs) that enhance performance with reduced parameters. Despite the success, RAG may introduce novel security issues that warrant further investigation. In this paper, we propose BadRDM, the first poisoning framework targeting RDMs, to systematically investigate their vulnerability to backdoor attacks. Our framework fully considers RAG’s characteristics by manipulating the retrieved items for specific text triggers to ultimately control the generated outputs. Specifically, we first insert a tiny portion of images into the retrieval database as target toxicity surrogates. We then exploit the contrastive learning mechanism underlying retrieval models by designing a malicious variant that establishes robust shortcuts from triggers to toxicity surrogates. In addition, we introduce novel entropy-based selection and generative augmentation strategies for better toxicity surrogates. Extensive experiments on two mainstream tasks show that the proposed method achieves outstanding attack effects while preserving benign utility. Notably, BadRDM remains effective even under common defense strategies, further highlighting serious security concerns for RDMs.