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One token is enough: fingerprinting LLMs from one token output distributions (arxiv.org)
6 points by anigbrowl 77 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A model's identity shows in its answers to one-word prompts like "name a number from 1 to 100"—the pattern of those answers. It verified the advertised model with a 7.3% error rate from about 100 queries; usual checks need long texts or hidden scores.

Abstract · One Token Is Enough: Fingerprinting and Verifying Large Language Models from Single-Token Output Distributions

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly consumed through opaque serving chains - API aggregators, resellers, and inference providers - in which the client has no technical means to confirm that the model answering is the model advertised, and recent audits show that a substantial fraction of commercial endpoints deviate from the vendor's reference weights. Existing identification techniques require long generated texts, token-level log-probabilities, adversarially crafted prompts, or the model owner's cooperation. We show that far weaker evidence suffices. We define a behavioral fingerprint of an LLM as the empirical distribution of its answers to trivial one-word prompts - "name a random number between 1 and 100" - collected across four languages at a cost of one output token per query. Measuring 165 models served via a large commercial aggregator (OpenRouter), we find that (i) these distributions are highly non-uniform (median cell entropy 1.0 bit) and model-specific: split halves of the same model's samples lie an order of magnitude closer than samples of different models; (ii) Jensen-Shannon divergence between fingerprints recovers model lineage, assigning a model to its documented family with 59.5% leave-one-out accuracy against an 18.4% chance rate; and (iii) a biometric-style verification protocol achieves a 7.3% equal error rate with the full 40-cell battery, and below 11% with eight probe cells - roughly a hundred single-token queries per audit. We further report ecosystem anomalies, including a proprietary-branded flagship endpoint distributionally indistinguishable from an open-weight Qwen model. The protocol, prompts, raw data, and analysis code are released for reproduction and operational use.

Tomas Bruckner
arXiv:2607.10252 · cs.CR, cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Jul 11, 2026
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