Papers for

software compliance auditors

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Attack resistant fingerprinting methods protect multimodal large language models

Fingerprinting Multimodal Large Language Models

Abstract: While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) enable a wide range of image-text reasoning tasks, recent incidents indicate that they are vulnerable to illicit deployment and unauthorized distillation. Existing solutions for model provenance are typically confounded by shared language backbones in MLLMs and struggle to detect violations of distillation. To bridge this gap and safeguard model ownership, we present the first study on multimodal model fingerprinting. Inspired by recent findings that self-attention acts as a low-pass filter and that its low-frequency components are informative, we develop AttnPrint for white-box provenance. Specifically, we extract cross-modal attention distributions and isolate their low-frequency components to serve as model fingerprints. To facilitate black-box auditing, we further introduce DistillTrace, which employs hypothesis testing of MLLM outputs to identify potential model infringement. We conduct extensive experiments on 154 model instances across 19 multimodal architectures. Notably, AttnPrint achieves strong derivative-model detection performance while remaining robust to five downstream modification techniques. DistillTrace also provides evidence of distillation relationships under three parameter-independent techniques.

Thu 17 SeptCryptography and SecurityArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that understand images and text can be stolen or copied without permission. The authors found ways to create unique 'fingerprints' from how these models attend to information, which helps prove ownership if someone uses the model unlawfully. They also developed a way to detect if a model has been copied (distilled) by analyzing its outputs. Their methods were tested on many models and can resist attempts to hide or alter the fingerprints.
Open 2609.20457v1