United We Stand, Divided We Fall: Fingerprinting Deep Neural Networks via Adversarial Trajectories

Tianlong Xu, Chen Wang, Gaoyang Liu, Yang Yang, Kai Peng +1 more
2/3/2026

No official code found. Best implementation: SPHelixLab/ADV-TRA (2 stars, last commit 2024-10-20).

Abstract

In recent years, deep neural networks (DNNs) have witnessed extensive applications, and protecting their intellectual property (IP) is thus crucial. As a non-invasive way for model IP protection, model fingerprinting has become popular. However, existing single-point based fingerprinting methods are highly sensitive to the changes in the decision boundary, and may suffer from the misjudgment of the resemblance of sparse fingerprinting, yielding high false positives of innocent models. In this paper, we propose ADV-TRA, a more robust fingerprinting scheme that utilizes adversarial trajectories to verify the ownership of DNN models. Bene-fited from the intrinsic progressively adversarial level, the trajectory is capable of tolerating greater degree of alteration in decision boundaries. We further design novel schemes to generate a surface trajectory that involves a series of fixed-length trajectories with dynamically adjusted step sizes. Such a design enables a more unique and reliable fingerprinting with relatively low querying costs. Experiments on three datasets against four types of removal attacks show that ADV-TRA exhibits superior performance in distinguishing between infringing and innocent models, outperforming the state-of-the-art comparisons.

DOISemantic Scholar

Code Implementations(1)

SPHelixLab/ADV-TRACommunity63%

The code for NeurIPS'25 paper "United We Stand, Divided We Fall: Fingerprinting Deep Neural Networks via Adversarial Trajectories"

21PythonOct 14, 20242 years ago

Cite this paper

@article{xu2026united,
  title  = {United We Stand, Divided We Fall: Fingerprinting Deep Neural Networks via Adversarial Trajectories},
  author = {Tianlong Xu and Chen Wang and Gaoyang Liu and Yang Yang and Kai Peng and Wei Liu},
  year   = {2026},
  doi    = {10.52202/079017-2213},
  url    = {https://doi.org/10.52202/079017-2213},
  journal = {NEURIPS 2024 2024}
}

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