United We Stand, Divided We Fall: Fingerprinting Deep Neural Networks via Adversarial Trajectories

In recent years, deep neural networks (DNNs) have witnessed extensive applications, and protecting their intellectual property (IP) is thus crucial. As a non-invasive way for model IP protection, model fingerprinting has become popular. However, existing single-point based fingerprinting methods are highly sensitive to the changes in the decision boundary, and may suffer from the misjudgment of the resemblance of sparse fingerprinting, yielding high false positives of innocent models. In this paper, we propose ADV-TRA, a more robust fingerprinting scheme that utilizes adversarial trajectories to verify the ownership of DNN models. Benefited from the intrinsic progressively adversarial level, the trajectory is capable of tolerating greater degree of alteration in decision boundaries. We further design novel schemes to generate a surface trajectory that involves a series of fixed-length trajectories with dynamically adjusted step sizes. Such a design enables a more unique and reliable fingerprinting with relatively low querying costs. Experiments on three datasets against four types of removal attacks show that ADV-TRA exhibits superior performance in distinguishing between infringing and innocent models, outperforming the state-of-the-art comparisons.