Protecting Copyright of Medical Pre-trained Language Models: Training-Free Backdoor Model Watermarking

With the advancement of intelligent healthcare, medical pre-trained language models (Med-PLMs) have emerged and demonstrated significant effectiveness in downstream medical tasks. While these models are valuable assets, they are vulnerable to misuse and theft, requiring copyright protection. However, existing watermarking methods for pre-trained language models (PLMs) cannot be directly applied to Med-PLMs due to domain-task mismatch and inefficient watermark embedding. To fill this gap, we propose the first training-free backdoor model watermarking for Med-PLMs. Our method employs low-frequency words as triggers, embedding the watermark by replacing their embeddings in the model's word embedding layer with those of specific medical terms. The watermarked Med-PLMs produce the same output for triggers as for the corresponding specified medical terms. We leverage this unique mapping to design tailored watermark extraction schemes for different downstream tasks, thereby addressing the challenge of domain-task mismatch in previous methods. Experiments demonstrate superior effectiveness of our watermarking method across medical downstream tasks. Moreover, the method exhibits robustness against model extraction, pruning, fusion-based backdoor removal attacks, while maintaining high efficiency with 10-second watermark embedding.

@article{kong2025_2409.10570,
  title={ Protecting Copyright of Medical Pre-trained Language Models: Training-Free Backdoor Model Watermarking },
  author={ Cong Kong and Rui Xu and Weixi Chen and Jiawei Chen and Zhaoxia Yin },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.10570},
  year={ 2025 }
}