SimpleMark: Fast Multi-Bit Text Watermarking under f -Divergence Constraints

Benjamin D. Kim, Wanrong Zhang, Weitong Ruan, Lav R. Varshney, Daniel Alabi

We introduce a framework for multi-bit text watermarking with security defined directly through $f$-divergence from the base language model distribution. Unlike prior approaches that focus on average-key distortion-freeness or a particular statistical distance, our formulation supports general $f$-divergences, including total variation and KL divergence, and enforces the guarantee for each realized key and embedded message. We develop a coding-based watermarking scheme that optimally biases next-token distributions subject to a prescribed divergence budget, and characterize the resulting tradeoff between embedding rate, decoding reliability, and statistical security. Experimentally, we compare our method against prior multi-bit watermarking schemes across modern language models and payload regimes. Our approach achieves substantially lower watermark detectability while maintaining competitive message-recovery performance and generation quality. Our results provide a unified view of secure multi-bit watermarking and recover several commonly used security notions as special cases.