Transfer Learning-Based Model Protection With Secret Key

We propose a novel method for protecting trained models with a secret key so that unauthorized users without the correct key cannot get the correct inference. By taking advantage of transfer learning, the proposed method enables us to train a large protected model like a model trained with ImageNet by using a small subset of a training dataset. The proposed method utilizes a learnable encryption step with a secret key to generate learnable transformed images. Models with pre-trained weights are fine-tuned by using such transformed images. In experiments with the ImageNet dataset, it is shown that the performance of a protected model was close to that of a non-protected model when the correct key was given, while the accuracy tremendously dropped when an incorrect key was used. The protected model was also demonstrated to be robust against key estimation attacks.