Decision Uncertainty-Oriented Watermarking (DUOW): Securing Multi-Agent Routing Against Policy Cloning

Abstract

Routing policies in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) represent valuable intellectual property, yet their exposure through execution logs creates significant risks of unauthorized policy cloning. Existing agent watermarking methods protect intellectual property by modifying internal generation processes, such as perturbing token sampling distributions or injecting structural mutations into action trajectories, which may compromise task fidelity or suffer from limited transferability across heterogeneous platforms. To address these limitations, we propose Decision Uncertainty-Oriented Watermarking (DUOW), a lightweight framework that operates at the external decision layer without modifying model parameters or generated outputs. DUOW introduces a plug-and-play scoring mechanism that evaluates candidate agents from semantic and operational perspectives, identifies functionally redundant routing decisions, and selectively redirects choices among equivalent alternatives to embed ownership signals. By coupling watermark behaviors with utility-preserving routing decisions, DUOW enables cloned policies to retain ownership signals during policy imitation while increasing the difficulty of watermark removal. A confidence-driven adaptive threshold dynamically determines embedding opportunities, balancing watermark capacity and task fidelity under diverse routing contexts. Extensive evaluations on four multi-agent routing benchmarks demonstrate that DUOW preserves high task utility, achieves reliable ownership verification under up to 90% log erasure, and introduces negligible computational overhead, with an average per-step latency of 0.043 ms and total embedding overhead below 0.54 ms.