On the Importance of Diversity in Data-free Model Stealing

Yiyong Liu, Rui Wen, Michael Backes, Yang Zhang

Abstract: Machine learning as a Service (MLaaS) allows users to query the machine learning model in an API manner, which provides an opportunity for users to enjoy the benefits brought by the high-performance model trained on valuable data. This interface boosts the flourish of machine learning based applications, while on the other hand, introduces the attack surface for model stealing attacks. Existing model stealing attacks have relaxed their attack assumptions to the data-free setting, while keeping the effectiveness. However, these methods are complex and consist of several components, which obscure the core on which the attack really depends. In this paper, we revisit the model stealing problem from a diversity perspective and demonstrate that keeping the generated data samples more diverse across all the classes is the critical point for improving the attack performance. Based on this conjecture, we provide a simplified attack framework. We empirically signify our conjecture by evaluating the effectiveness of our attack, and experimental results show that our approach is able to achieve comparable or even better performance compared with the state-of-the-art method. Furthermore, benefiting from the absence of redundant components, our method demonstrates its advantages in attack efficiency and query budget.

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