MAP: MAsk-Pruning for Source-Free Model Intellectual Property Protection
Authors: Boyang Peng, Sanqing Qu, Yong Wu, Tianpei Zou, Lianghua He, Alois Knoll, Guang Chen, Changjun Jiang

Deep learning has achieved remarkable progress in various applications heightening the importance of safeguarding the intellectual property (IP) of well-trained models. It entails not only authorizing usage but also ensuring the deployment of models in authorized data domains i.e. making models exclusive to certain target domains. Previous methods necessitate concurrent access to source training data and target unauthorized data when performing IP protection making them risky and inefficient for decentralized private data. In this paper we target a practical setting where only a well-trained source model is available and investigate how we can realize IP protection. To achieve this we propose a novel MAsk Pruning (MAP) framework. MAP stems from an intuitive hypothesis i.e. there are target-related parameters in a well-trained model locating and pruning them is the key to IP protection. Technically MAP freezes the source model and learns a target-specific binary mask to prevent unauthorized data usage while minimizing performance degradation on authorized data. Moreover we introduce a new metric aimed at achieving a better balance between source and target performance degradation. To verify the effectiveness and versatility we have evaluated MAP in a variety of scenarios including vanilla source-available practical source-free and challenging data-free. Extensive experiments indicate that MAP yields new state-of-the-art performance.