TI-StegoAlign: Channel-Guided Post-Training for Generative Text Steganography under Tokenization Inconsistency

Abstract

Generative text steganography enables LLM agents to exchange secret information through task-relevant messages. Yet most methods evaluate recovery on sender-side tokens, whereas the receiver observes only surface text. Detokenization and receiver-side retokenization can alter token boundaries, desynchronize coding states, and cause such evaluation to overestimate receiver-side recovery. Existing remedies rely on inference-time filtering or verification, correcting individual outputs without adapting the generation policy to the receiver-side channel. To address these limitations, we propose TI-StegoAlign, a channel-guided post-training framework. The Bit-Consistent Supervised Objective (BCSO) enlarges local coding margins at realized sender-side embedding positions. Channel-Conditioned Preference Optimization (CCPO) then aligns complete stegotexts using receiver-realistic recovery, text quality, and anti-steganalysis feedback. TI-StegoAlign updates only LoRA parameters and requires no tokenization-specific correction during communication. Experimental results show 100% receiver bit accuracy. Compared with the strongest baselines, TI-StegoAlign achieves a 21.6% reduction in normalized perplexity deviation and a 6.3% relative improvement in anti-steganalysis performance.