cs.AIMar 5, 2026

Authorize-on-Demand: Dynamic Authorization with Legality-Aware Intellectual Property Protection for VLMs

Authors: Lianyu Wang, Meng Wang, Huazhu Fu, Daoqiang Zhang

Organizations: The Key Laboratory of Brain-Machine Intelligence Technology, Ministry of Education, China · Centre for Innovation and Precision Eye Health, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS, Singapore · Department of Ophthalmology, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS, Singapore · Institute of High Performance Computing, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore

Abstract

The rapid adoption of vision-language models (VLMs) has heightened the demand for robust intellectual property (IP) protection of these high-value pretrained models. Effective IP protection should proactively confine model deployment within authorized domains and prevent unauthorized transfers. However, existing methods rely on static training-time definitions, limiting flexibility in dynamic environments and often producing opaque responses to unauthorized inputs. To address these limitations, we propose a novel dynamic authorization with legality-aware intellectual property protection (AoD-IP) for VLMs, a framework that supports authorize-on-demand and legality-aware assessment. AoD-IP introduces a lightweight dynamic authorization module that enables flexible, user-controlled authorization, allowing users to actively specify or switch authorized domains on demand at deployment time. This enables the model to adapt seamlessly as application scenarios evolve and provides substantially greater extensibility than existing static-domain approaches. In addition, AoD-IP incorporates a dual-path inference mechanism that jointly predicts input legality-aware and task-specific outputs. Comprehensive experimental results on multiple cross-domain benchmarks demonstrate that AoD-IP maintains strong authorized-domain performance and reliable unauthorized detection, while supporting user-controlled authorization for adaptive deployment in dynamic environments.

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