Robust Watermarking for Deep Neural Networks via Bi-Level Optimization

Peng Yang, Yingjie Lao, Ping Li; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 14841-14850

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become state-of-the-art in many application domains. The increasing complexity and cost for building these models demand means for protecting their intellectual property (IP). This paper presents a novel DNN framework that optimizes the robustness of the embedded watermarks. Our method is originated from DNN fault attacks. Different from prior end-to-end DNN watermarking approaches, we only modify a tiny subset of weights to embed the watermark, which also facilities better control of the model behaviors and enables larger rooms for optimizing the robustness of the watermarks. In this paper, built upon the above concept, we propose a bi-level optimization framework where the inner loop phase optimizes the example-level problem to generate robust exemplars, while the outer loop phase proposes a masked adaptive optimization to achieve the robustness of the projected DNN models. Our method alternates the learning of the protected models and watermark exemplars across all phases, where watermark exemplars are not just data samples that could be optimized and adjusted instead. We verify the performance of the proposed methods over a wide range of datasets and DNN architectures. Various transformation attacks including fine-tuning, pruning and overwriting are used to evaluate the robustness.