Stolen Subwords: Importance of Vocabularies for Machine Translation
  Model Stealing
Vilém Zouhar
In learning-based functionality stealing, the attacker is trying to build a
local model based on the victim's outputs. The attacker has to make choices
regarding the local model's architecture, optimization method and, specifically
for NLP models, subword vocabulary, such as BPE. On the machine translation
task, we explore (1) whether the choice of the vocabulary plays a role in model
stealing scenarios and (2) if it is possible to extract the victim's
vocabulary. We find that the vocabulary itself does not have a large effect on
the local model's performance. Given gray-box model access, it is possible to
collect the victim's vocabulary by collecting the outputs (detokenized subwords
on the output). The results of the minimum effect of vocabulary choice are
important more broadly for black-box knowledge distillation.