{"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/towards-robust-model-watermark-via-reducing","title":"Towards Robust Model Watermark via Reducing Parametric Vulnerability","arxiv_id":"2309.04777","date":"2023-09-09","proceeding":"ICCV 2023 1","authors":["Guanhao Gan","Yiming Li","Dongxian Wu","Shu-Tao Xia"],"abstract":"Deep neural networks are valuable assets considering their commercial benefits and huge demands for costly annotation and computation resources. To protect the copyright of DNNs, backdoor-based ownership verification becomes popular recently, in which the model owner can watermark the model by embedding a specific backdoor behavior before releasing it. The defenders (usually the model owners) can identify whether a suspicious third-party model is ``stolen'' from them based on the presence of the behavior. Unfortunately, these watermarks are proven to be vulnerable to removal attacks even like fine-tuning. To further explore this vulnerability, we investigate the parameter space and find there exist many watermark-removed models in the vicinity of the watermarked one, which may be easily used by removal attacks. Inspired by this finding, we propose a mini-max formulation to find these watermark-removed models and recover their watermark behavior. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method improves the robustness of the model watermarking against parametric changes and numerous watermark-removal attacks. The codes for reproducing our main experiments are available at \\url{https://github.com/GuanhaoGan/robust-model-watermarking}.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.04777v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.04777v1.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":"towards-robust-model-watermark-via-reducing","repo_url":"https://github.com/guanhaogan/robust-model-watermarking","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"model","task_name":"model"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2309.04777","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}