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Abstract
Training large language models (LLMs) is resource-intensive and expensive,
making protecting intellectual property (IP) for LLMs crucial. Recently,
embedding fingerprints into LLMs has emerged as a prevalent method for
establishing model ownership. However, existing back-door-based methods suffer
from limited stealth and efficiency. To simultaneously address these issues, we
propose EditMF, a training-free fingerprinting paradigm that achieves highly
imperceptible fingerprint embedding with minimal computational overhead.
Ownership bits are mapped to compact, semantically coherent triples drawn from
an encrypted artificial knowledge base (e.g., virtual author-novel-protagonist
facts). Causal tracing localizes the minimal set of layers influencing each
triple, and a zero-space update injects the fingerprint without perturbing
unrelated knowledge. Verification requires only a single black-box query and
succeeds when the model returns the exact pre-embedded protagonist. Empirical
results on LLaMA and Qwen families show that EditMF combines high
imperceptibility with negligible model's performance loss, while delivering
robustness far beyond LoRA-based fingerprinting and approaching that of SFT
embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EditMF is an effective and
low-overhead solution for secure LLM ownership verification.