{"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/stolen-subwords-importance-of-vocabularies","title":"Stolen Subwords: Importance of Vocabularies for Machine Translation Model Stealing","arxiv_id":"2401.16055","date":"2024-01-29","proceeding":null,"authors":["Vilém Zouhar"],"abstract":"In learning-based functionality stealing, the attacker is trying to build a local model based on the victim's outputs. The attacker has to make choices regarding the local model's architecture, optimization method and, specifically for NLP models, subword vocabulary, such as BPE. On the machine translation task, we explore (1) whether the choice of the vocabulary plays a role in model stealing scenarios and (2) if it is possible to extract the victim's vocabulary. We find that the vocabulary itself does not have a large effect on the local model's performance. Given gray-box model access, it is possible to collect the victim's vocabulary by collecting the outputs (detokenized subwords on the output). The results of the minimum effect of vocabulary choice are important more broadly for black-box knowledge distillation.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.16055v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.16055v1.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":"stolen-subwords-importance-of-vocabularies","repo_url":"https://github.com/zouharvi/vocab-stealing","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"knowledge-distillation","task_name":"Knowledge Distillation"},{"task_slug":"machine-translation","task_name":"Machine Translation"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}