@inproceedings{
zhu2024reliable,
title={Reliable Model Watermarking: Defending Against Theft without Compromising on Evasion},
author={Hongyu Zhu and Sichu liang and Wentao Hu and Li Fangqi and Ju Jia and Shi-Lin Wang},
booktitle={ACM Multimedia 2024},
year={2024},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=APtNKKqyd2}
}
With the rise of Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) platforms, safeguarding the intellectual property of deep learning models is becoming paramount. Among various protective measures, trigger set watermarking has emerged as a flexible and effective strategy for preventing unauthorized model distribution. However, this paper identifies an inherent flaw in the current paradigm of trigger set watermarking: evasion adversaries can readily exploit the shortcuts created by models memorizing watermark samples that deviate from the main task distribution, significantly impairing their generalization in adversarial settings. To counteract this, we leverage diffusion models to synthesize unrestricted adversarial examples as trigger sets. By learning the model to accurately recognize them, unique watermark behaviors are promoted through knowledge injection rather than error memorization, thus avoiding exploitable shortcuts. Furthermore, we uncover that the resistance of current trigger set watermarking against removal attacks primarily relies on significantly damaging the decision boundaries during embedding, intertwining unremovability with adverse impacts. By optimizing the knowledge transfer in protected models during extraction, our approach conveys watermark behaviors without aggressive decision boundary perturbation. Experimental results on CIFAR-10/100 and Imagenette datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, showing not only improved robustness against evasion adversaries but also superior resistance to watermark removal attacks compared to existing state-of-the-art solutions.
Reliable Model Watermarking: Defending Against Theft without Compromising on Evasion
Hongyu Zhu Sichu liang Wentao Hu Li Fangqi Ju Jia Shi-Lin Wang