Structural Watermarking to Deep Neural Networks via Network Channel Pruning

In order to protect the intellectual property (IP) of deep neural networks (DNNs), many existing DNN watermarking techniques either embed watermarks directly into the DNN parameters or insert backdoor watermarks by fine-tuning the DNN parameters, which, however, cannot resist against various attack methods that remove watermarks by altering DNN parameters. In this paper, we bypass such attacks by introducing a structural watermarking scheme that utilizes channel pruning to embed the watermark into the host DNN architecture instead of crafting the DNN parameters. To be specific, during watermark embedding, we prune the internal channels of the host DNN with the channel pruning rates controlled by the watermark. During watermark extraction, the watermark is retrieved by identifying the channel pruning rates from the architecture of the target DNN model. Due to the superiority of pruning mechanism, the performance of the DNN model on its original task is reserved during watermark embedding. Experimental results have shown that, the proposed work enables the embedded watermark to be reliably recovered and provides a sufficient payload, without sacrificing the usability of the DNN model. It is also demonstrated that the proposed work is robust against common transforms and attacks designed for conventional watermarking approaches.