Adaptive and Robust Watermark for Generative Tabular Data

TMLR Paper5025 Authors

Abstract: Recent development in generative models has demonstrated its ability to create high-quality synthetic data. However, the pervasiveness of synthetic content online also brings forth growing concerns that it can be used for malicious purpose. To ensure the authenticity of the data, watermarking techniques have recently emerged as a promising solution due to their strong statistical guarantees. In this paper, we propose a flexible and robust watermarking mechanism for generative tabular data. Specifically, a data provider with knowledge of the downstream tasks can partition the feature space into pairs of (key, value) columns. Within each pair, the data provider first uses elements in the key column to generate a randomized set of ``green'' intervals, then encourages elements of the value column to be in one of these ``green'' intervals. We show theoretically and empirically that the watermarked datasets (i) have negligible impact on the data quality and downstream utility, (ii) can be efficiently detected, (iii) are robust against multiple attacks commonly observed in data science, and (iv) maintain strong security against adversary attempting to learn the underlying watermark scheme.

Submission Length: Regular submission (no more than 12 pages of main content)

Assigned Action Editor: ~Yutian_Chen1

Submission Number: 5025