Papers › Fingerprinting Fine-tuned Language Models in the Wild

Fingerprinting Fine-tuned Language Models in the Wild

3 Jun 2021Findings (ACL) 2021 8arXiv:2106.01703archive 2025-07-28

Nirav Diwan, Tanmoy Chakravorty, Zubair Shafiq

There are concerns that the ability of language models (LMs) to generate high quality synthetic text can be misused to launch spam, disinformation, or propaganda. Therefore, the research community is actively working on developing approaches to detect whether a given text is organic or synthetic. While this is a useful first step, it is important to be able to further fingerprint the author LM to attribute its origin. Prior work on fingerprinting LMs is limited to attributing synthetic text generated by a handful (usually < 10) of pre-trained LMs. However, LMs such as GPT2 are commonly fine-tuned in a myriad of ways (e.g., on a domain-specific text corpus) before being used to generate synthetic text. It is challenging to fingerprinting fine-tuned LMs because the universe of fine-tuned LMs is much larger in realistic scenarios. To address this challenge, we study the problem of large-scale fingerprinting of fine-tuned LMs in the wild. Using a real-world dataset of synthetic text generated by 108 different fine-tuned LMs, we conduct comprehensive experiments to demonstrate the limitations of existing fingerprinting approaches. Our results show that fine-tuning itself is the most effective in attributing the synthetic text generated by fine-tuned LMs.

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

16 samples harvested; 0 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 16 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

Licence: 0 of the 16 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from LCS2-IIITD/ACL-FFLM. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

Tasks

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections