IPMark: A Sentence-Level Watermark for LLMs with Hierarchical Personalization and Efficient Detection

Watermarking has emerged as a critical solution for the detection and provenance tracing of content generated by large language models. However, existing methods still suffer from significant limitations, including difficulties in achieving efficient and personalized attribution, substantial degradation of generation quality, and low robustness against attacks. To address these challenges, we propose IPMark, the first IP-inspired hierarchical personalized watermarking framework. Specifically, to enable personalization and efficient detection, IPMark employs a hierarchical addressing framework to structurally organize model and user identities. Subsequently, addressing the inherent semantic distortion caused by token-level watermarking, we design a semantic-syntactic dual-stream embedding strategy. Centered on sentence-level candidate selection and reinforced by dual signals from syntactic and semantic features, this approach optimizes the injection process, thereby significantly enhancing generation quality while ensuring strong robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that IPMark achieves the lowest perplexity among baselines, ensuring superior generation quality while maintaining strong robustness and significantly reducing detection latency through hierarchical retrieval. Our code is available at https://github.com/nwlt/IPMark.