Merkle-Chained LoRA Genealogy and Hopfield Attractor Watermarking for Adapter Provenance Verification
Weslyn Cory Whitehead · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
We present two complementary techniques for LoRA adapter provenance. Hopfield Attractor Watermarking (HAW) embeds Hopfield-style attractor patterns as rank-1 LoRA component deltas, verifiable via a sentinel forward pass and tolerant of Q4_K_M quantization via 8-bit fingerprinting. Merkle-Chained Adapter Genealogy (MCAG) chains adapters into a verifiable Merkle tree via SHA-256 parent hashes. Together they detect adversarial weight modification, unauthorized derivation, and base model spoofing. Applied to the LoRA adapter proliferation problem on public model hubs. The combination addresses three practical attack vectors with a unified verification API and no training-time modifications.