Subtle adversarial image manipulations influence both human and machine perception

Vijay Veerabadran, Josh Goldman, Shreya Shankar, Brian Cheung, Nicolas Papernot, Alexey Kurakin, Ian Goodfellow, Jonathon Shlens, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Michael C. Mozer and Gamaleldin F. Elsayed ()
Additional contact information
Vijay Veerabadran: Google
Josh Goldman: Google
Shreya Shankar: Google
Brian Cheung: Google
Nicolas Papernot: Google DeepMind
Alexey Kurakin: Google DeepMind
Ian Goodfellow: Google DeepMind
Jonathon Shlens: Google DeepMind
Jascha Sohl-Dickstein: Google DeepMind
Michael C. Mozer: Google DeepMind
Gamaleldin F. Elsayed: Google DeepMind

Nature Communications, 2023, vol. 14, issue 1, 1-12

Abstract: Abstract Although artificial neural networks (ANNs) were inspired by the brain, ANNs exhibit a brittleness not generally observed in human perception. One shortcoming of ANNs is their susceptibility to adversarial perturbations—subtle modulations of natural images that result in changes to classification decisions, such as confidently mislabelling an image of an elephant, initially classified correctly, as a clock. In contrast, a human observer might well dismiss the perturbations as an innocuous imaging artifact. This phenomenon may point to a fundamental difference between human and machine perception, but it drives one to ask whether human sensitivity to adversarial perturbations might be revealed with appropriate behavioral measures. Here, we find that adversarial perturbations that fool ANNs similarly bias human choice. We further show that the effect is more likely driven by higher-order statistics of natural images to which both humans and ANNs are sensitive, rather than by the detailed architecture of the ANN.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-40499-0

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