arXiv Machine Learning By Hamed Poursiami, Farshad Soleiman, Ahmad Tahmasivand, Guojing Cong, Thomas Potok, Khaled N. Khasawneh, Kai Zeng, Maryam Parsa

Intellectual Property Protection of Hyperdimensional Computing Classifiers: Black-Box Ownership Verification via Model Watermarking

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

The paper investigates model watermarking for hyperdimensional computing (HDC) classifiers, adapting backdoor-based embedding to three prototype‑learning mechanisms. Across four benchmarks, error‑driven models (AdaptHD and OnlineHD) support ownership verification with minimal accuracy loss, while single‑pass Vanilla HDC requires higher trigger exposure and incurs larger accuracy penalties. The study also shows that watermarks can be overwritten, survive certain stress tests on FPGA, but may be lost during extraction or severe stress, highlighting both feasibility and limitations of HDC watermarking.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

MeMark: Membrane-Space Watermarking for Spiking Neural Networks

MeMark introduces a watermarking scheme for Spiking Neural Networks that embeds a multi‑bit identifier directly into the membrane state of selected Leaky Integrate‑and‑Fire neurons, rather than in the output head. The watermark is recoverable by comparing neuron firing thresholds, eliminating the need for a learned decoder. Experiments on various SNN architectures—including a 215.4M‑parameter SpikeGPT checkpoint—show that all 20 independent 64‑bit keys reliably pass verification under a 51/64 rule, remain robust after fine‑tuning, pruning, quantization, and output‑head replacement, and are not recovered by random keys or adaptive attacks within the tested threat model.

By Roberto Ria\~no, Gorka Abad, Stjepan Picek, Aitor Urbieta
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

CertDW: Towards Certified Dataset Ownership Verification via Conformal Calibration

The paper introduces CertDW, a certified dataset watermark and ownership verification method that remains reliable even under malicious perturbations. By leveraging conformal prediction, it defines two statistical measures—principal probability (PP) and watermark robustness (WR)—to evaluate model stability on benign versus watermarked samples. The authors derive certification conditions linking WR to a PP-based threshold and provide a high‑probability bound on false positives, enabling robust ownership verification when a suspicious model’s WR exceeds the PP values of benign models.

By Ting Qiao, Yiming Li, Jianbin Li, Yingjia Wang, Leyi Qi, Junfeng Guo, Ruili Feng, Dacheng Tao