I train a new model. I publish my training data and my training code/workflow.
I then secretly do additional post-training to poison it. I do not release the data or workflow for this.
Now, I publish the poisoned weights and an md5 hash of the poisoned weights.
To you, the user - you have no way of knowing this happened.
You might ask "why not publish intermediate training checkpoints" but those are nondeterministic (in the sense of being not bitwise-reproducible). Anything with shuffling, random initialization, distributed races, driver versions changing roundoff, compiled vs. eager, and a million other factors introduce slight differences that yield totally different training trajectories. So publishing checkpoints does not yield verifiability.
alt Hacker News
Say I'm a lab.
I train a new model. I publish my training data and my training code/workflow.
I then secretly do additional post-training to poison it. I do not release the data or workflow for this.
Now, I publish the poisoned weights and an md5 hash of the poisoned weights.
To you, the user - you have no way of knowing this happened.
You might ask "why not publish intermediate training checkpoints" but those are nondeterministic (in the sense of being not bitwise-reproducible). Anything with shuffling, random initialization, distributed races, driver versions changing roundoff, compiled vs. eager, and a million other factors introduce slight differences that yield totally different training trajectories. So publishing checkpoints does not yield verifiability.