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Abstract
Large language models are increasingly customized through fine-tuning and
other adaptations, creating challenges in enforcing licensing terms and
managing downstream impacts. Tracking model origins is crucial both for
protecting intellectual property and for identifying derived models when biases
or vulnerabilities are discovered in foundation models. We address this
challenge by developing a framework for testing model provenance: Whether one
model is derived from another. Our approach is based on the key observation
that real-world model derivations preserve significant similarities in model
outputs that can be detected through statistical analysis. Using only black-box
access to models, we employ multiple hypothesis testing to compare model
similarities against a baseline established by unrelated models. On two
comprehensive real-world benchmarks spanning models from 30M to 4B parameters
and comprising over 600 models, our tester achieves 90-95% precision and 80-90%
recall in identifying derived models. These results demonstrate the viability
of systematic provenance verification in production environments even when only
API access is available.