Tokenized Model: A Blockchain-Empowered Decentralized Model Ownership
  Verification Platform
Yihao Li Yanyi Lai Tianchi Liao Chuan Chen Zibin Zheng
With the development of practical deep learning models like generative AI,
their excellent performance has brought huge economic value. For instance,
ChatGPT has attracted more than 100 million users in three months. Since the
model training requires a lot of data and computing power, a well-performing
deep learning model is behind a huge effort and cost. Facing various model
attacks, unauthorized use and abuse from the network that threaten the
interests of model owners, in addition to considering legal and other
administrative measures, it is equally important to protect the model's
copyright from the technical means. By using the model watermarking technology,
we point out the possibility of building a unified platform for model ownership
verification. Given the application history of blockchain in copyright
verification and the drawbacks of a centralized third-party, this paper
considers combining model watermarking technology and blockchain to build a
unified model copyright protection platform. By a new solution we called
Tokenized Model, it protects the model's copyright by reliable ownership record
and verification mechanism. It also promotes the financial value of model by
constructing the model's transaction process and contribution shares of a
model. In the typical case study, we also study the various performance under
usual scenario to verify the effectiveness of this platform.