Position paper accepted the ICML

We are pleased to share the EWADA team member Dr Rui Zhao has a new paper accepted by the premier AI conference – ICML 2025. The paper is our first collaoboration with researchers from National University of Singapore.

Moming Duan, Mingzhe Du, Rui Zhao, Mengying Wang, Yinghui Wu, Nigel Shadbolt, Bingsheng He. Current Model Licensing Practices are Dragging Us into a Quagmire of Legal Noncompliance. The 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2025)

Title: Current Model Licensing Practices are Dragging Us into a Quagmire of Legal Noncompliance

Abstract:

The Machine Learning (ML) community has witnessed explosive growth, with millions of ML models being published on the Web. Reusing ML model components has been prevalent nowadays. Developers are often required to choose a license to publish and govern the use of their models. Popular options include Apache-2.0, OpenRAIL (Responsible AI Licenses), Creative Commons Licenses (CCs), Llama2, and GPL-3.0. Currently, no standard or widely accepted best practices exist for model licensing. But does this lack of standardization lead to undesired consequences? Our answer is Yes. After reviewing the clauses of the most widely adopted licenses, we take the position that current model licensing practices are dragging us into a quagmire of legal noncompliance. To support this view, we explore the cur- rent practices in model licensing and highlight the differences between various model licenses. We then identify potential legal risks associated with these licenses and demonstrate these risks using examples from real-world repositories on Hugging Face. To foster a more standardized future for model licensing, we also propose a new draft of model licenses, ModelGo Licenses (MGLs), to address these challenges and promote better compliance. https://www.modelgo.li/

The paper can be found at pdf and the presentation can be found here