Transferable Watermarking to Self-supervised Pre-trained Graph Encoders by Trigger Embeddings
<|reference_start|>Transferable Watermarking to Self-supervised Pre-trained Graph Encoders by Trigger Embeddings: Recent years have witnessed the prosperous development of Graph Self-supervised Learning (GSSL), which enables to pre-train transferable foundation graph encoders. However, the easy-to-plug-in nature of such encoders makes them vulnerable to copyright infringement. To address this issue, we develop a novel watermarking framework to protect graph encoders in GSSL settings. The key idea is to force the encoder to map a set of specially crafted trigger instances into a unique compact cluster in the outputted embedding space during model pre-training. Consequently, when the encoder is stolen and concatenated with any downstream classifiers, the resulting model inherits the `backdoor' of the encoder and predicts the trigger instances to be in a single category with high probability regardless of the ground truth. Experimental results have shown that, the embedded watermark can be transferred to various downstream tasks in black-box settings, including node classification, link prediction and community detection, which forms a reliable watermark verification system for GSSL in reality. This approach also shows satisfactory performance in terms of model fidelity, reliability and robustness.<|reference_end|>
@article{zhao2024transferable,
    title={Transferable Watermarking to Self-supervised Pre-trained Graph Encoders
  by Trigger Embeddings},
    author={Xiangyu Zhao, Hanzhou Wu and Xinpeng Zhang},
    journal={IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security
  (IEEE WIFS'2024)},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2406.13177},
    primaryClass={cs.CR}
}