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CATER: Intellectual Property Protection on Text Generation APIs via Conditional Watermarks

He, X; Xu, Q; Zeng, Y; Lyu, L; Wu, F; Li, J; Jia, R; (2022) CATER: Intellectual Property Protection on Text Generation APIs via Conditional Watermarks. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. NeurIPS Green open access

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Abstract

Previous works have validated that text generation APIs can be stolen through imitation attacks, causing IP violations. In order to protect the IP of text generation APIs, recent work has introduced a watermarking algorithm and utilized the null-hypothesis test as a post-hoc ownership verification on the imitation models. However, we find that it is possible to detect those watermarks via sufficient statistics of the frequencies of candidate watermarking words. To address this drawback, in this paper, we propose a novel Conditional wATERmarking framework (CATER) for protecting the IP of text generation APIs. An optimization method is proposed to decide the watermarking rules that can minimize the distortion of overall word distributions while maximizing the change of conditional word selections. Theoretically, we prove that it is infeasible for even the savviest attacker (they know how CATER works) to reveal the used watermarks from a large pool of potential word pairs based on statistical inspection. Empirically, we observe that high-order conditions lead to an exponential growth of suspicious (unused) watermarks, making our crafted watermarks more stealthy. In addition, CATER can effectively identify IP infringement under architectural mismatch and cross-domain imitation attacks, with negligible impairments on the generation quality of victim APIs. We envision our work as a milestone for stealthily protecting the IP of text generation APIs.

Type: Proceedings paper
Title: CATER: Intellectual Property Protection on Text Generation APIs via Conditional Watermarks
Event: 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022)
ISBN-13: 9781713871088
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
Publisher version: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2...
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the version of record. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10173687
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