Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal: Model Extraction Attacks Against Image Translation Generative Adversarial Networks


Abstract in English

Machine learning models are typically made available to potential client users via inference APIs. Model extraction attacks occur when a malicious client uses information gleaned from queries to the inference API of a victim model $F_V$ to build a surrogate model $F_A$ that has comparable functionality. Recent research has shown successful model extraction attacks against image classification, and NLP models. In this paper, we show the first model extraction attack against real-world generative adversarial network (GAN) image translation models. We present a framework for conducting model extraction attacks against image translation models, and show that the adversary can successfully extract functional surrogate models. The adversary is not required to know $F_V$s architecture or any other information about it beyond its intended image translation task, and queries $F_V$s inference interface using data drawn from the same domain as the training data for $F_V$. We evaluate the effectiveness of our attacks using three different instances of two popular categories of image translation: (1) Selfie-to-Anime and (2) Monet-to-Photo (image style transfer), and (3) Super-Resolution (super resolution). Using standard performance metrics for GANs, we show that our attacks are effective in each of the three cases -- the differences between $F_V$ and $F_A$, compared to the target are in the following ranges: Selfie-to-Anime: FID $13.36-68.66$, Monet-to-Photo: FID $3.57-4.40$, and Super-Resolution: SSIM: $0.06-0.08$ and PSNR: $1.43-4.46$. Furthermore, we conducted a large scale (125 participants) user study on Selfie-to-Anime and Monet-to-Photo to show that human perception of the images produced by the victim and surrogate models can be considered equivalent, within an equivalence bound of Cohens $d=0.3$.

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