Training a high-performance deep neural network requires large amounts of
data and computational resources. Protecting the intellectual property (IP) and
commercial ownership of a deep model is challenging yet increasingly crucial. A
major stream of watermarking strategies implants verifiable backdoor triggers
by poisoning training samples, but these are often unrealistic due to data
privacy and safety concerns and are vulnerable to minor model changes such as
fine-tuning. To overcome these challenges, we propose a safe and robust
backdoor-based watermark injection technique that leverages the diverse
knowledge from a single out-of-distribution (OoD) image, which serves as a
secret key for IP verification. The independence of training data makes it
agnostic to third-party promises of IP security. We induce robustness via
random perturbation of model parameters during watermark injection to defend
against common watermark removal attacks, including fine-tuning, pruning, and
model extraction. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed
watermarking approach is not only time- and sample-efficient without training
data, but also robust against the watermark removal attacks above.

训练高性能深度神经网络需要大量的数据和计算资源。保护深度模型的知识产权和商业所有权具有挑战性但又越来越重要。本研究提出了一种安全而稳健的基于后门的水印注入技术，利用单个超出分布图像的多样知识作为知识产权验证的秘密密钥。该技术不仅在没有训练数据的情况下快速高效，而且对抵抗水印去除攻击具有鲁棒性。