Title: Every Step Counts: Decoding Trajectories as Authorship Fingerprints of dLLMs
Primary area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations
Keywords: Model Attribution, Discrete Diffusion LLMs

Abstract: Discrete Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive paradigm for non-autoregressive language modeling. Their distinctive decoding mechanism enables faster inference speed and strong performance in code generation and mathematical tasks. In this work, we show that the decoding mechanism of dLLMs not only enhances model utility but also can be used as a powerful tool for model attribution. Specifically, by analyzing the decoding trajectory associated with a given response, we can effectively identify its source model, thereby helping to mitigate risks of harmful content caused by model misuse. A key challenge in this problem lies in the diversity of attribution scenarios, including distinguishing between different models as well as between different checkpoints or backups of the same model. To ensure broad applicability, we identify two fundamental problems: **what information to extract from the decoding trajectory, and how to utilize it effectively.** We first observe that relying directly on per-step model confidence yields poor performance. This is mainly due to the bidirectional decoding nature of dLLMs: each newly decoded token influences the confidence of other decoded tokens, making model confidence highly redundant and washing out structural signal regarding decoding order or dependencies. To overcome this, we propose a novel information extraction scheme called the **Directed Decoding Map (DDM)**, which captures structural relationships between decoding steps and better reveals model-specific behaviors. Furthermore, to make full use of the extracted structural information during attribution, we propose **Gaussian-Trajectory Attribution (GTA)**, where we fit a cell-wise Gaussian distribution at each decoding position for each target model, and define the log-likelihood difference of a trajectory under different distributions as the attribution score: if a trajectory exhibits higher log-likelihood under the distribution of a specific model, it is more likely to have been generated by that model. Extensive experiments under different settings validate the utility of our methods.