Overview
- Cisco's Model Provenance Kit, released Thursday, fingerprints transformer weights to tell if one model descends from another.
- The companion Model Provenance Constitution defines lineage as a proven chain of weight derivation, sets a strict evidence bar, and defaults to no link when proof is unclear.
- The toolkit uses a two-stage process that screens architecture first and then blends five weight-based signals into a single identity score.
- It ships with compare and scan modes, open code on GitHub, and an initial fingerprint set for about 150 base models on Hugging Face.
- Cisco reports 96.4% accuracy on a 111-pair test with strong precision and recall, while noting four misses after extreme architectural changes that push the method to its limits.