Yuheng Bu Receives NSF CAREER Award for Research on LLM Watermarking

Yuheng Bu, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara, has been awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for research on watermarking methods for large language models. The award, funded through NSF's Division of Electrical, Communications and Cyber Systems (Award No. 2543381), supports the project "LLM Watermarking and Beyond: Foundations and Algorithms via Distributional Information Embedding".

The project addresses a pressing challenge in responsible AI deployment: the need for reliable, robust, and secure methods for identifying and tracing AI-generated text. Rather than treating watermarking as a binary detection problem, Bu's research develops methods capable of encoding multi-bit information into LLM outputs, enabling attribution to a specific model, system, or authorized use case while preserving text quality.

The research frames LLM watermarking as a distributional information embedding problem, accounting for the sequential nature of text generation and characterizing fundamental trade-offs among detectability, text quality, information rate, robustness to removal, and resistance to spoofing. The project produces efficient, deployable watermarking algorithms with provable performance guarantees, alongside authentication mechanisms designed to distinguish genuine watermarks from adversarial forgeries and to detect removal attempts.

Practical applications investigated by the project include intellectual property protection for training datasets, detection of AI-generated reviews and other AI-assisted writing, and secure communication among LLM-based agents. The project also supports educational activities including course modules and mentored research experiences that prepare students to reason about reliability, security, and trade-offs in generative AI systems, with an emphasis on broadening participation in computing.

The NSF CAREER Award is the foundation's most prestigious recognition for early-career faculty who have demonstrated the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education.