DICTION:DynamIC robusT whIte bOx watermarkiNg scheme for deep neural networks

Abstract: Deep neural network (DNN) watermarking is a suitable method for protecting the ownership of deep learning (DL) models. It secretly embeds an identifier (watermark) within the model, which can be retrieved by the owner to prove ownership. In this paper, we first provide a unified framework for white box DNN watermarking schemes. It includes current state-of-the-art methods outlining their theoretical inter-connections. Next, we introduce DICTION, a new white-box Dynamic Robust watermarking scheme, we derived from this framework. Its main originality stands on a generative adversarial network (GAN) strategy where the watermark extraction function is a DNN trained as a GAN discriminator taking the target model to watermark as a GAN generator with a latent space as the input of the GAN trigger set. DICTION can be seen as a generalization of DeepSigns which, to the best of our knowledge, is the only other Dynamic white-box watermarking scheme from the literature. Experiments conducted on the same model test set as Deepsigns demonstrate that our scheme achieves much better performance. Especially, with DICTION, one can increase the watermark capacity while preserving the target model accuracy at best and simultaneously ensuring strong watermark robustness against a wide range of watermark removal and detection attacks.