Zewei Deng
Author directory2026
Detecting Post-generation Edits to Watermarked LLM Outputs via Error-Correcting Codes
Zewei Deng | Muhammad Siddeek | Liyan Xie | Mohamed Mohamed | Mengdi Wang | H. Vincent Poor | Andrea Goldsmith
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Zewei Deng | Muhammad Siddeek | Liyan Xie | Mohamed Mohamed | Mengdi Wang | H. Vincent Poor | Andrea Goldsmith
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Watermarking has become a key mechanism for distinguishing AI-generated from human-written texts. In practical settings, however, content produced by large language models (LLMs) is often subject to critical post-generation edits, posing challenges for detecting and localizing such modifications. In this work, we propose incorporating error-correcting codes, specifically Varshamov-Tenengolts (VT) codes, by embedding VT code strings into watermarked LLM outputs, thus enabling post-generation edit detection of token insertions and deletions. We accompany such a watermarking procedure with a watermark detector and a post-edit detector. We evaluate our method on open-source LLM using synthetic edits and demonstrate excellent empirical performance of post-generation edit detection.