Intrinsic Fingerprint of LLMs: Continue Training is NOT All You Need to Steal A Model!
This addresses copyright and intellectual property challenges for LLM developers, highlighting that continued training is insufficient to obscure model origins, though it is incremental in improving fingerprinting techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of protecting intellectual property in large language models (LLMs) by introducing a robust fingerprinting method based on intrinsic model characteristics, specifically the standard deviation distributions of attention parameter matrices, which remain stable after continued training and can identify model lineage with evidence showing a Huawei model derived from Qwen-2.5 14B.
Large language models (LLMs) face significant copyright and intellectual property challenges as the cost of training increases and model reuse becomes prevalent. While watermarking techniques have been proposed to protect model ownership, they may not be robust to continue training and development, posing serious threats to model attribution and copyright protection. This work introduces a simple yet effective approach for robust LLM fingerprinting based on intrinsic model characteristics. We discover that the standard deviation distributions of attention parameter matrices across different layers exhibit distinctive patterns that remain stable even after extensive continued training. These parameter distribution signatures serve as robust fingerprints that can reliably identify model lineage and detect potential copyright infringement. Our experimental validation across multiple model families demonstrates the effectiveness of our method for model authentication. Notably, our investigation uncovers evidence that a recently Pangu Pro MoE model released by Huawei is derived from Qwen-2.5 14B model through upcycling techniques rather than training from scratch, highlighting potential cases of model plagiarism, copyright violation, and information fabrication. These findings underscore the critical importance of developing robust fingerprinting methods for protecting intellectual property in large-scale model development and emphasize that deliberate continued training alone is insufficient to completely obscure model origins.