{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/black-box-ripper-copying-black-box-models","title":"Black-Box Ripper: Copying black-box models using generative evolutionary algorithms","arxiv_id":"2010.11158","date":"2020-10-21","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2020 12","authors":["Antonio Barbalau","Adrian Cosma","Radu Tudor Ionescu","Marius Popescu"],"abstract":"We study the task of replicating the functionality of black-box neural models, for which we only know the output class probabilities provided for a set of input images. We assume back-propagation through the black-box model is not possible and its training images are not available, e.g. the model could be exposed only through an API. In this context, we present a teacher-student framework that can distill the black-box (teacher) model into a student model with minimal accuracy loss. To generate useful data samples for training the student, our framework (i) learns to generate images on a proxy data set (with images and classes different from those used to train the black-box) and (ii) applies an evolutionary strategy to make sure that each generated data sample exhibits a high response for a specific class when given as input to the black box. Our framework is compared with several baseline and state-of-the-art methods on three benchmark data sets. The empirical evidence indicates that our model is superior to the considered baselines. Although our method does not back-propagate through the black-box network, it generally surpasses state-of-the-art methods that regard the teacher as a glass-box model. Our code is available at: https://github.com/antoniobarbalau/black-box-ripper.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11158v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.11158v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"black-box-ripper-copying-black-box-models","repo_url":"https://github.com/antoniobarbalau/black-box-ripper","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"evolutionary-algorithms","task_name":"Evolutionary Algorithms"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2010.11158","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2010.11158"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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