huggingface/transformers · error · ValueError

Some of the keys in `watermarking_config` are defined incorr

Error message

Some of the keys in `watermarking_config` are defined incorrectly. `{key}` should be {correct_value}` but found {found_value}

What it means

ValueError from WatermarkingConfig.validate(): seeding_scheme must be one of 'selfhash' or 'lefthash' (the two supported hash-input schemes for the Kirchenbauer watermark logits processor). Any other string is rejected because the watermark detector would compute a different greenlist than the generator, silently breaking detectability.

Source

Thrown at src/transformers/generation/configuration_utils.py:1474

        greenlist_ratio: float = 0.25,
        bias: float = 2.0,
        hashing_key: int = 15485863,
        seeding_scheme: str = "lefthash",
        context_width: int = 1,
    ):
        self.greenlist_ratio = greenlist_ratio
        self.bias = bias
        self.hashing_key = hashing_key
        self.seeding_scheme = seeding_scheme
        self.context_width = context_width

    def validate(self):
        watermark_missing_arg_msg = (
            "Some of the keys in `watermarking_config` are defined incorrectly. `{key}` should be {correct_value}` "
            "but found {found_value}"
        )
        if self.seeding_scheme not in ["selfhash", "lefthash"]:
            raise ValueError(
                watermark_missing_arg_msg.format(
                    key="seeding_scheme",
                    correct_value="[`selfhash`, `lefthash`]",
                    found_value=self.seeding_scheme,
                ),
            )
        if not 0.0 <= self.greenlist_ratio <= 1.0:
            raise ValueError(
                watermark_missing_arg_msg.format(
                    key="greenlist_ratio",
                    correct_value="in range between 0.0 and 1.0",
                    found_value=self.seeding_scheme,
                ),
            )
        if not self.context_width >= 1:
            raise ValueError(
                watermark_missing_arg_msg.format(
                    key="context_width",

View on GitHub (pinned to a597f97485)

Solutions

1. Use exactly 'selfhash' or 'lefthash' as seeding_scheme
2. Remove the argument entirely to keep the default scheme
3. Check the installed version's docstring for WatermarkingConfig to see supported values

Example fix

# before
wm = WatermarkingConfig(greenlist_ratio=0.25, seeding_scheme='self-hash')
# after
wm = WatermarkingConfig(greenlist_ratio=0.25, seeding_scheme='selfhash')

if wm_cfg.seeding_scheme not in ('selfhash', 'lefthash'):
    wm_cfg.seeding_scheme = 'selfhash'  # or raise

def valid_scheme(s: str) -> bool:
    return s in ('selfhash', 'lefthash')

When it happens

Trigger: WatermarkingConfig(greenlist_ratio=0.25, seeding_scheme='self-hash') (hyphen instead of 'selfhash'); passing a SynthID-style or custom scheme name; typo like 'left_hash'. Note the message template has a stray backtick and interpolates the found value, so read key/correct_value carefully.

Common situations: Copying scheme names from papers or blog posts ('self-hash', 'ff-additive') rather than the supported set; version upgrades where accepted scheme strings changed.

Related errors

• `early_stopping` must be a boolean or 'never', but is {}.
• `max_new_tokens` must be greater than 0, but is {}.
• Invalid `cache_implementation` ({}). Choose one of: {}
• Greedy methods (do_sample != True) without beam search do no
• `num_return_sequences` ({}) has to be smaller or equal to `n

AI-assisted analysis of huggingface/transformers@a597f97485 (2026-08-14). Data as JSON: /api/errors/bc41c221f47dec10. Report an issue: GitHub.