Knowledge Distillation Detection for Open-weights Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Shi, Qin, Zheng, Amber Yijia, Song, Qifan, Yeh, Raymond A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Shi, Qin
Zheng, Amber Yijia
Song, Qifan
Yeh, Raymond A.
author_facet Shi, Qin
Zheng, Amber Yijia
Song, Qifan
Yeh, Raymond A.
contents We propose the task of knowledge distillation detection, which aims to determine whether a student model has been distilled from a given teacher, under a practical setting where only the student's weights and the teacher's API are available. This problem is motivated by growing concerns about model provenance and unauthorized replication through distillation. To address this task, we introduce a model-agnostic framework that combines data-free input synthesis and statistical score computation for detecting distillation. Our approach is applicable to both classification and generative models. Experiments on diverse architectures for image classification and text-to-image generation show that our method improves detection accuracy over the strongest baselines by 59.6% on CIFAR-10, 71.2% on ImageNet, and 20.0% for text-to-image generation. The code is available at https://github.com/shqii1j/distillation_detection.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_02302
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Knowledge Distillation Detection for Open-weights Models
Shi, Qin
Zheng, Amber Yijia
Song, Qifan
Yeh, Raymond A.
Machine Learning
We propose the task of knowledge distillation detection, which aims to determine whether a student model has been distilled from a given teacher, under a practical setting where only the student's weights and the teacher's API are available. This problem is motivated by growing concerns about model provenance and unauthorized replication through distillation. To address this task, we introduce a model-agnostic framework that combines data-free input synthesis and statistical score computation for detecting distillation. Our approach is applicable to both classification and generative models. Experiments on diverse architectures for image classification and text-to-image generation show that our method improves detection accuracy over the strongest baselines by 59.6% on CIFAR-10, 71.2% on ImageNet, and 20.0% for text-to-image generation. The code is available at https://github.com/shqii1j/distillation_detection.
title Knowledge Distillation Detection for Open-weights Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02302