English

Cosine Model Watermarking Against Ensemble Distillation

Cryptography and Security 2022-03-08 v1 Multimedia

Abstract

Many model watermarking methods have been developed to prevent valuable deployed commercial models from being stealthily stolen by model distillations. However, watermarks produced by most existing model watermarking methods can be easily evaded by ensemble distillation, because averaging the outputs of multiple ensembled models can significantly reduce or even erase the watermarks. In this paper, we focus on tackling the challenging task of defending against ensemble distillation. We propose a novel watermarking technique named CosWM to achieve outstanding model watermarking performance against ensemble distillation. CosWM is not only elegant in design, but also comes with desirable theoretical guarantees. Our extensive experiments on public data sets demonstrate the excellent performance of CosWM and its advantages over the state-of-the-art baselines.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2203.02777,
  title  = {Cosine Model Watermarking Against Ensemble Distillation},
  author = {Laurent Charette and Lingyang Chu and Yizhou Chen and Jian Pei and Lanjun Wang and Yong Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.02777},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

Accepted by AAAI 2022 (see https://aaai-2022.virtualchair.net/poster_aaai3921 ) | A python notebook of the case study can be found at https://developer.huaweicloud.com/develop/aigallery/notebook/detail?id=2d937a91-1692-4f88-94ca-82e1ae8d4d79

R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:03:15.859Z