Protect, Show, Attend and Tell: Image Captioning Model with Ownership Protection

By and large, existing Intellectual Property Right (IPR) protection on deep neural networks typically i) focus on image classification task only, and ii) follow a standard digital watermarking framework that were conventionally used to protect the ownership of multimedia and video content. This paper demonstrates that current digital watermarking framework is insufficient to protect image captioning task that often regarded as one of the frontier A.I. problems. As a remedy, this paper studies and proposes two different embedding schemes in the hidden memory state of a recurrent neural network to protect image captioning model. From both theoretically and empirically points, we prove that a forged key will yield an unusable image captioning model, defeating the purpose on infringement. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to propose ownership protection on image captioning task. Also, extensive experiments show that the proposed method does not compromise the original image captioning performance on all common captioning metrics on Flickr30k and MS-COCO datasets, and at the same time it is able to withstand both removal and ambiguity attacks.