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Security and distribution matching

# Towards Near-imperceptible Steganographic Text

Falcon Z. Dai, Zheng Cai

First arXiv submission: July 15, 2019 · ACL 2019

Published version: July 2019. The publication and preprint records below retain their own dates and identifiers.

Analyzes how binning and variable-length encoding alter a language model's output distribution. Its patient-Huffman method skips message embedding at steps where the induced distribution would differ too much from the model.

[Read paper ↗](https://aclanthology.org/P19-1422/) · [PDF ↗](https://aclanthology.org/P19-1422.pdf) · [Code ↗](https://github.com/falcondai/lm-steganography)

## Relationship to Neural Linguistic Steganography

Neural Linguistic Steganography explicitly identifies this as concurrent research on distributional analysis and modified Huffman coding, distinct from its arithmetic-coding approach.

## Scope and limitations

Tight total-variation bounds require restrictive per-step thresholds, with useful throughput depending on the model's distributions; the paper also identifies vulnerability to an active adversary modifying text.

## Cite this paper

### Published version

Falcon Z. Dai, Zheng Cai. [Towards Near-imperceptible Steganographic Text](https://aclanthology.org/P19-1422/). Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2019

[Published version BibTeX](https://steganography.live/reading-list/papers/dai-cai-2019/publication.bib) · [Published version CSL-JSON](https://steganography.live/reading-list/papers/dai-cai-2019/publication.csl.json)
Show BibTeX`@inproceedings{dai-cai-2019-publication,
  title = {{Towards Near-imperceptible Steganographic Text}},
  author = {Dai, Falcon Z. and Cai, Zheng},
  year = {2019},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/P19-1422},
  pages = {4303--4308},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/P19-1422/}
}
`

### arXiv preprint

Falcon Z. Dai, Zheng Cai. [Towards Near-imperceptible Steganographic Text](https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.06679v1). arXiv:1907.06679. First submission: July 15, 2019.

This citation records the first arXiv version and its original title. The version-specific link distinguishes it from later revisions; cite the version supporting your claim.

[arXiv preprint BibTeX](https://steganography.live/reading-list/papers/dai-cai-2019/preprint.bib) · [arXiv preprint CSL-JSON](https://steganography.live/reading-list/papers/dai-cai-2019/preprint.csl.json)
Show BibTeX`@misc{dai-cai-2019-preprint,
  title = {{Towards Near-imperceptible Steganographic Text}},
  author = {Dai, Falcon Z. and Cai, Zheng},
  year = {2019},
  publisher = {arXiv},
  eprint = {1907.06679v1},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.06679v1}
}
`

## Primary sources

- [Published title, authors, venue, date, DOI, pages.](https://aclanthology.org/P19-1422/)

- [First arXiv submission July 15, 2019.](https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.06679)

- [Section 3.3 gives patient-Huffman and threshold qualification; section 4 identifies active-adversary limitations.](https://aclanthology.org/P19-1422.pdf)

- [Section 2 calls Dai and Cai concurrent work.](https://aclanthology.org/D19-1115.pdf)

- [Author repository explicitly accompanies the paper and implements patient-Huffman.](https://github.com/falcondai/lm-steganography)

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These notes are an editorial reading aid. Consult the primary sources for the authors’ claims, assumptions, and experiments.