Free Fine-tuning: A Plug-and-Play Watermarking Scheme for Deep Neural Networks

Run Wang, Jixing Ren, Boheng Li, Tianyi She, Wenhui Zhang, Liming Fang, Jing Chen, Lina Wang

Abstract: Watermarking has been widely adopted for protecting the intellectual property (IP) of Deep Neural Networks (DNN) to defend the unauthorized distribution. Unfortunately, studies have shown that the popular data-poisoning DNN watermarking scheme via tedious model fine-tuning on a poisoned dataset (carefully-crafted sample-label pairs) is not efficient in tackling the tasks on challenging datasets and production-level DNN model protection. To address the aforementioned limitation, in this paper, we propose a plug-and-play watermarking scheme for DNN models by injecting an independent proprietary model into the target model to serve the watermark embedding and ownership verification. In contrast to the prior studies, our proposed method by incorporating a proprietary model is free of target model fine-tuning without involving any parameters update of the target model, thus the fidelity is well preserved and scalable to challenging real tasks. Experimental results on real-world challenging datasets (e.g., ImageNet) and production-level DNN models demonstrated its effectiveness, fidelity w.r.t. the functionality preservation of the target model, robustness against popular watermark removal attacks, and the plug-and-play deployment. The source code and models are available at https://github.com/AntigoneRandy/PTYNet.