Shuo Shao

Cheng Wei, Yang Wang, Kuofeng Gao et al.

Recently, point clouds have been widely used in computer vision, whereas their collection is time-consuming and expensive. As such, point cloud datasets are the valuable intellectual property of their owners and deserve protection. To detect and prevent unauthorized use of these datasets, especially for commercial or open-sourced ones that cannot be sold again or used commercially without permission, we intend to identify whether a suspicious third-party model is trained on our protected dataset under the black-box setting. We achieve this goal by designing a scalable clean-label backdoor-based dataset watermark for point clouds that ensures both effectiveness and stealthiness. Unlike existing clean-label watermark schemes, which are susceptible to the number of categories, our method could watermark samples from all classes instead of only from the target one. Accordingly, it can still preserve high effectiveness even on large-scale datasets with many classes. Specifically, we perturb selected point clouds with non-target categories in both shape-wise and point-wise manners before inserting trigger patterns without changing their labels. The features of perturbed samples are similar to those of benign samples from the target class. As such, models trained on the watermarked dataset will have a distinctive yet stealthy backdoor behavior, i.e., misclassifying samples from the target class whenever triggers appear, since the trained DNNs will treat the inserted trigger pattern as a signal to deny predicting the target label. We also design a hypothesis-test-guided dataset ownership verification based on the proposed watermark. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets are conducted, verifying the effectiveness of our method and its resistance to potential removal methods.

Shuo Shao, Wenyuan Yang, Hanlin Gu et al.

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm allowing multiple clients to collaboratively train a global model without sharing their local data. However, FL entails exposing the model to various participants. This poses a risk of unauthorized model distribution or resale by the malicious client, compromising the intellectual property rights of the FL group. To deter such misbehavior, it is essential to establish a mechanism for verifying the ownership of the model and as well tracing its origin to the leaker among the FL participants. In this paper, we present FedTracker, the first FL model protection framework that provides both ownership verification and traceability. FedTracker adopts a bi-level protection scheme consisting of global watermark mechanism and local fingerprint mechanism. The former authenticates the ownership of the global model, while the latter identifies which client the model is derived from. FedTracker leverages Continual Learning (CL) principles to embed the watermark in a way that preserves the utility of the FL model on both primitive task and watermark task. FedTracker also devises a novel metric to better discriminate different fingerprints. Experimental results show FedTracker is effective in ownership verification, traceability, and maintains good fidelity and robustness against various watermark removal attacks.

Wenyuan Yang, Shuo Shao, Yue Yang et al.

Federated learning (FL) allows multiple participants to collaboratively build deep learning (DL) models without directly sharing data. Consequently, the issue of copyright protection in FL becomes important since unreliable participants may gain access to the jointly trained model. Application of homomorphic encryption (HE) in secure FL framework prevents the central server from accessing plaintext models. Thus, it is no longer feasible to embed the watermark at the central server using existing watermarking schemes. In this paper, we propose a novel client-side FL watermarking scheme to tackle the copyright protection issue in secure FL with HE. To our best knowledge, it is the first scheme to embed the watermark to models under the Secure FL environment. We design a black-box watermarking scheme based on client-side backdooring to embed a pre-designed trigger set into an FL model by a gradient-enhanced embedding method. Additionally, we propose a trigger set construction mechanism to ensure the watermark cannot be forged. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed scheme delivers outstanding protection performance and robustness against various watermark removal attacks and ambiguity attack.

Yiming Li, Kaiying Yan, Shuo Shao et al.

With the increasing adoption of deep learning in speaker verification, large-scale speech datasets have become valuable intellectual property. To audit and prevent the unauthorized usage of these valuable released datasets, especially in commercial or open-source scenarios, we propose a novel dataset ownership verification method. Our approach introduces a clustering-based backdoor watermark (CBW), enabling dataset owners to determine whether a suspicious third-party model has been trained on a protected dataset under a black-box setting. The CBW method consists of two key stages: dataset watermarking and ownership verification. During watermarking, we implant multiple trigger patterns in the dataset to make similar samples (measured by their feature similarities) close to the same trigger while dissimilar samples are near different triggers. This ensures that any model trained on the watermarked dataset exhibits specific misclassification behaviors when exposed to trigger-embedded inputs. To verify dataset ownership, we design a hypothesis-test-based framework that statistically evaluates whether a suspicious model exhibits the expected backdoor behavior. We conduct extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, verifying the effectiveness and robustness of our method against potential adaptive attacks. The code for reproducing main experiments is available at https://github.com/Radiant0726/CBW

Shuo Shao, Yiming Li, Hongwei Yao et al.

Ownership verification is currently the most critical and widely adopted post-hoc method to safeguard model copyright. In general, model owners exploit it to identify whether a given suspicious third-party model is stolen from them by examining whether it has particular properties `inherited' from their released models. Currently, backdoor-based model watermarks are the primary and cutting-edge methods to implant such properties in the released models. However, backdoor-based methods have two fatal drawbacks, including harmfulness and ambiguity. The former indicates that they introduce maliciously controllable misclassification behaviors ($i.e.$, backdoor) to the watermarked released models. The latter denotes that malicious users can easily pass the verification by finding other misclassified samples, leading to ownership ambiguity. In this paper, we argue that both limitations stem from the `zero-bit' nature of existing watermarking schemes, where they exploit the status ($i.e.$, misclassified) of predictions for verification. Motivated by this understanding, we design a new watermarking paradigm, $i.e.$, Explanation as a Watermark (EaaW), that implants verification behaviors into the explanation of feature attribution instead of model predictions. Specifically, EaaW embeds a `multi-bit' watermark into the feature attribution explanation of specific trigger samples without changing the original prediction. We correspondingly design the watermark embedding and extraction algorithms inspired by explainable artificial intelligence. In particular, our approach can be used for different tasks ($e.g.$, image classification and text generation). Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness and harmlessness of our EaaW and its resistance to potential attacks.

Yukun Chen, Shuo Shao, Enhao Huang et al.

Backdoor attacks on deep neural networks (DNNs) have emerged as a significant security threat, allowing adversaries to implant hidden malicious behaviors during the model training phase. Pre-processing-based defense, which is one of the most important defense paradigms, typically focuses on input transformations or backdoor trigger inversion (BTI) to deactivate or eliminate embedded backdoor triggers during the inference process. However, these methods suffer from inherent limitations: transformation-based defenses often fail to balance model utility and defense performance, while BTI-based defenses struggle to accurately reconstruct trigger patterns without prior knowledge. In this paper, we propose REFINE, an inversion-free backdoor defense method based on model reprogramming. REFINE consists of two key components: \textbf{(1)} an input transformation module that disrupts both benign and backdoor patterns, generating new benign features; and \textbf{(2)} an output remapping module that redefines the model's output domain to guide the input transformations effectively. By further integrating supervised contrastive loss, REFINE enhances the defense capabilities while maintaining model utility. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our REFINE and its resistance to potential adaptive attacks.