MMODELYST
Papers/COPYCOP: Ownership Verification for Graph Neural Networks
PAP

COPYCOP: Ownership Verification for Graph Neural Networks

May 6, 2026

arXiv
Abstract

Given two GNNs that output node embeddings, how can we determine if they were trained independently? An adversary could have trained one GNN specifically to mimic the other GNN's embeddings. To obscure this relationship between the GNNs, the adversarial GNN might then transform its output embeddings. The two GNNs could have different architectures, weights, and embedding dimensions, and the adversary can transform the embeddings. Despite these stringent conditions, our algorithm (named CopyCop) can identify such copycat GNNs, unlike existing watermarking and fingerprinting methods. We also provide theoretical guarantees for CopyCop. Finally, experiments on 14 datasets and 5 GNN architectures demonstrate that CopyCop is accurate and robust against a broad class of adversarial attacks and transformations. Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CopyCop-Graph-Ownership-Verification-8143/README.md

Select text to highlight · click a highlight to remove · saved in this browser only
Authors
Rahul Nandakumar, Deepayan Chakrabarti
Your notes (browser-local)
saved
arXiv:2605.05360