Li Guo

As large language models (LLMs) generate increasingly human-like text, watermarking offers a promising solution for reliable attribution beyond mere detection. While multi-bit watermarking enables richer provenance encoding, existing methods largely extend zero-bit schemes through seed-driven steering, leading to indirect information flow, limited effective capacity, and suboptimal decoding. In this paper, we propose WorldCup, a multi-bit watermarking framework for LLMs that treats sampling as a natural communication channel and embeds message bits directly into token selection via a hierarchical competition mechanism guided by complementary signals. Moreover, WorldCup further adopts entropy-aware modulation to preserve generation quality and supports robust message recovery through confidence-aware decoding. Comprehensive experiments show that WorldCup achieves a strong balance across capacity, detectability, robustness, text quality, and decoding efficiency, consistently outperforming prior baselines and laying a solid foundation for future LLM watermarking studies.

With the rapid development of cloud-based services, large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly accessible through various web platforms. However, this accessibility has also led to growing risks of model abuse. LLM watermarking has emerged as an effective approach to mitigate such misuse and protect intellectual property. Existing watermarking algorithms, however, primarily focus on defending against paraphrase attacks while overlooking piggyback spoofing attacks, which can inject harmful content, compromise watermark reliability, and undermine trust in attribution. To address this limitation, we propose DualGuard, the first watermarking algorithm capable of defending against both paraphrase and spoofing attacks. DualGuard employs the adaptive dual-stream watermarking mechanism, in which two complementary watermark signals are dynamically injected based on the semantic content. This design enables DualGuard not only to detect but also to trace spoofing attacks, thereby ensuring reliable and trustworthy watermark detection. Extensive experiments conducted across multiple datasets and language models demonstrate that DualGuard achieves excellent detectability, robustness, traceability, and text quality, effectively advancing the state of LLM watermarking for real-world applications.