Abstract
In recent years, tremendous success has been witnessed in Retrieval-Augmented
Generation (RAG), widely used to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) in
domain-specific, knowledge-intensive, and privacy-sensitive tasks. However,
attackers may steal those valuable RAGs and deploy or commercialize them,
making it essential to detect Intellectual Property (IP) infringement. Most
existing ownership protection solutions, such as watermarks, are designed for
relational databases and texts. They cannot be directly applied to RAGs because
relational database watermarks require white-box access to detect IP
infringement, which is unrealistic for the knowledge base in RAGs. Meanwhile,
post-processing by the adversary's deployed LLMs typically destructs text
watermark information. To address those problems, we propose a novel black-box
"knowledge watermark" approach, named RAG-WM, to detect IP infringement of
RAGs. RAG-WM uses a multi-LLM interaction framework, comprising a Watermark
Generator, Shadow LLM & RAG, and Watermark Discriminator, to create watermark
texts based on watermark entity-relationship tuples and inject them into the
target RAG. We evaluate RAG-WM across three domain-specific and two
privacy-sensitive tasks on four benchmark LLMs. Experimental results show that
RAG-WM effectively detects the stolen RAGs in various deployed LLMs.
Furthermore, RAG-WM is robust against paraphrasing, unrelated content removal,
knowledge insertion, and knowledge expansion attacks. Lastly, RAG-WM can also
evade watermark detection approaches, highlighting its promising application in
detecting IP infringement of RAG systems.