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Abstract
Backdoor-based fingerprinting has emerged as an effective technique for
tracing the ownership of large language models. However, in real-world
deployment scenarios, developers often instantiate multiple downstream models
from a shared base model, and applying fingerprinting to each variant
individually incurs prohibitive computational overhead. While inheritance-based
approaches -- where fingerprints are embedded into the base model and expected
to persist through fine-tuning -- appear attractive, they suffer from three key
limitations: late-stage fingerprinting, fingerprint instability, and
interference with downstream adaptation. To address these challenges, we
propose a novel mechanism called the Fingerprint Vector. Our method first
embeds a fingerprint into the base model via backdoor-based fine-tuning, then
extracts a task-specific parameter delta as a fingerprint vector by computing
the difference between the fingerprinted and clean models. This vector can be
directly added to any structurally compatible downstream model, allowing the
fingerprint to be transferred post hoc without additional fine-tuning.
Extensive experiments show that Fingerprint Vector achieves comparable or
superior performance to direct injection across key desiderata. It maintains
strong effectiveness across diverse model architectures as well as mainstream
downstream variants within the same family. It also preserves harmlessness and
robustness in most cases. Even when slight robustness degradation is observed,
the impact remains within acceptable bounds and is outweighed by the
scalability benefits of our approach.