[HN Gopher] Fooling Neural Networks [pdf]
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       Fooling Neural Networks [pdf]
        
       Author : dvkndn
       Score  : 132 points
       Date   : 2021-08-06 11:05 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (slazebni.cs.illinois.edu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (slazebni.cs.illinois.edu)
        
       | rainboiboi wrote:
       | Newer slides from Spring 2021 class -
       | https://slazebni.cs.illinois.edu/spring21/lec13_adversarial....
        
       | shadowgovt wrote:
       | Does this attack require access to the neural network internals
       | or merely high-volume access to the input and output channels so
       | you can keep passing perturbed images in until you see the
       | classification flip?
        
       | zqbit wrote:
       | Fooling darknet https://imgur.com/a/EXHEIH5
        
       | zwieback wrote:
       | I have a background in classic image processing and machine
       | vision and back in the olden days we had the opposite problem:
       | algorithms were just too specific to build useful applications.
       | It's easy to detect lines and circles with a Hough Transform or
       | do template matching for features that very closely match a
       | sample. However, working up the chain it never came together,
       | detecting cars in a parking lot, a relatively simple task with
       | CNNs, was a very difficult problem.
       | 
       | I wonder if enough work is being done to combine the achievements
       | of each field. Whenever I see adversarial examples I wonder why
       | people aren't doing more preprocessing to root out obvious
       | problems with normalization in scale, color, perspective, etc.
       | Also, if we could feed networks with higher level descriptors
       | instead of feeding low-information-density color images, wouldn't
       | that make life easier.
       | 
       | I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking this, is there any good
       | research being done in that space?
        
         | TonyTrapp wrote:
         | I'm often thinking the same, and am only aware of a single
         | popular library doing that: rnnoise [0]
         | 
         | This library combines "classic" digital signal processing with
         | a smaller RNN. As a result, it's smaller, faster and probably
         | also has less uncanny edge cases than approaches that use an
         | RNN for the complete processing chain. I think many use cases
         | could benefit from this approach.
         | 
         | [0] https://jmvalin.ca/demo/rnnoise/
        
         | mjburgess wrote:
         | Because the new wave don't know how to do this. Deep Learning
         | as AI was sold as "statistics in place of physics" -- ie., no
         | need to understand reality (the target domain), simply brute
         | force it.
         | 
         | The peddlers of such a message were bamboozled by early
         | successes and lacked sufficient experience of empirical science
         | to realise this was never going to work.
         | 
         | No NN will discover the universal law of gravitation from any
         | dataset not collected on the basis of knowing this universal
         | law. With 'statistics _as_ theory ' there can never be new
         | theory, as a new theory is a precondition of a new dataset.
        
         | omeze wrote:
         | There's some stuff happening, eg applying anti-aliasing to
         | improve shift invariance:
         | https://richzhang.github.io/antialiased-cnns/ (also check out
         | the related papers)
        
         | nestorD wrote:
         | My feeling is that:
         | 
         | - lots of people in the DNN for machine vision community do not
         | have a background in classical techniques.
         | 
         | - a lot of classical techniques and preprocessing pass make no
         | real difference when applied to the input of a DNN and are thus
         | worth eliminating from the pipeline to simplify it (this has
         | been my experience).
         | 
         | However, I do think that there are gain to be gotten by
         | combining classical image processing ideas with neural
         | networks. It just hasn't really happened yet.
        
         | gradys wrote:
         | A library to do this that integrated well with typical
         | inference and and training systems would be a great
         | contribution!
        
       | only_as_i_fall wrote:
       | Anyone have a sense of how much of a problem this is?
       | 
       | It's not surprising that a network can be fooled by small input
       | changes, but if some image preprocessing is enough to solve this
       | It's not a big problem.
       | 
       | On the other hand, if I can make a sign that looks like a stop
       | sign to people but looks like a road work sign to a tesla, that's
       | obviously a big deal.
       | 
       | These slides touch on the difference by saying that physical
       | examples of adversarial inputs are harder, and they mention some
       | mitigation techniques, but they don't seem to really quantify how
       | effective mitigation is in real world scenarios.
        
         | AareyBaba wrote:
         | Tesla identifying the moon as a yellow traffic light ?
         | https://twitter.com/JordanTeslaTech/status/14184133078625853...
        
       | noiv wrote:
       | Looking from far far away at the examples it seems networks are
       | still trained towards a local optimum and are easily tripped.
       | Basically the equivalent of a card trick failing horribly the
       | moment audience enters the stage.
        
       | DSingularity wrote:
       | Can't we use the same method to generate adversarial inputs to
       | iteratively train multiple model? After each model is generated
       | we expand the data set by using the prior model to generate the
       | adversarial inputs and then train a classifier maximizes the
       | performance on both the inputs and adversarial inputs.
       | 
       | Now we just use n models in production and use voting for produce
       | the label.
       | 
       | As n gets large, does this become robust to adversarial inputs?
        
         | ampdepolymerase wrote:
         | Teacher student!!
        
         | orange3xchicken wrote:
         | This is basically adversarial training, which is a typical (&
         | very practical) benchmark heuristic defense for this problem.
         | An ongoing question is to precisely characterize when and how
         | AT works. The line of work has also proved to be very fruitful
         | for the theoretical community & has produced very general
         | results about problems which can be solved by neural networks,
         | but not other techniques- e.g. kernel methods.
         | 
         | https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04413
        
       | c0deb0t wrote:
       | Adversarial attacks is a super interesting field, but
       | unfortunately I feel that a lot of papers are just incremental
       | attack or defense improvements like a cat-and-mouse game. I
       | originally did some research on 3D point cloud attacks, but later
       | stopped because making super successful attacks (eg., attacks
       | with higher success rates than all the previous techniques for
       | some very specific task) don't really help us understand that
       | much more about neural nets, its just optimizing a metric for
       | publishing papers. This kind of research is quite common, even at
       | top conferences.
       | 
       | Despite this, recently, we made a 1 minute explainer video
       | introducing adversarial attacks on neural nets as a submission
       | for the Veritasium contest: https://youtu.be/hNuhdf-fL_g Give it
       | a watch!
        
       | cullinap wrote:
       | Is there an equivalent case of supernormal stimuli for NLP?
        
         | qayxc wrote:
         | Natural language is a bit too complex for that I think.
         | 
         | There can't be any universal stimuli simply because there's
         | multiple languages and cultures that don't all have the same
         | response to stimuli.
         | 
         | There's a relationship between neural activity and writing
         | system, for example [0].
         | 
         | Then there's stimuli that activate the language centre in some
         | languages (e.g. click-sounds the Khoisan language families in
         | Africa) but not in others. Some languages (especially East
         | Asian languages like Vietnamese) also use tone to distinguish
         | lexical or grammatical meaning, while Indo-European languages
         | do not. which is another significant difference in (here:
         | verbal) language processing.
         | 
         | All this leads me to conjecture that supernormal stimuli are
         | highly unlikely in this context due to the high-level nature of
         | the subject as well as the differences and the diversity in the
         | involved regions of the brain.
         | 
         | [0]
         | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01680...
        
       | NotSwift wrote:
       | The input space for these neural networks is huge, it is roughly
       | the number of colors to the power of the number of pixels. What
       | neural networks do is subdivide the input space and assign a
       | label to it. Because of the high dimension of the input space it
       | is very likely that it is possible to find images that are on the
       | boundary between two labels. Using more advanced techniques might
       | make it more difficult for an adversary to find such examples,
       | but it does not eliminate their existence.
       | 
       | One of the big problems with neural networks (and other AI
       | techniques as well) is that they cannot explain their
       | classifications, which makes it difficult to determine whether a
       | classification is correct. Most people seriously underestimate
       | how difficult this task is. Humans can do it quite easily because
       | our hardware has been optimized by eons of evolution. Neural
       | networks are only in their infancy.
        
         | tarxzvf wrote:
         | The problem goes much deeper than these adversarial examples.
         | The main issue is Solomonoff Uncomputability (or the No Free
         | Lunch in Search and Optimization theorem, or any of the other
         | hard limiting theorems).
         | 
         | In short, it's not only that you can devise adversarial
         | examples that find the blindspots of the function approximator
         | and fool it into misprediction, it's that for any learning
         | optimization algorithm you can abuse its priors and biases and
         | create an environment in which it will perform terribly. This
         | is a fundamental and inherent feature of how we go about
         | machine learning -- equating it with optimizing functions --
         | and we will need a paradigm shift to go around it.
         | 
         | It's curious to me how most of these results are known for
         | decades, yet most researchers seem dead set on ignoring them.
        
           | LeanderK wrote:
           | I think machine learning researchers are well aware that
           | successful optimisation is only possible using the right
           | priors. This is explicit in bayesian machine learning but
           | also implicit in neural networks in the choice of the
           | architecture, optimisation algorithm and hyper parameters.
           | It's a well discussed problem and a lot of researchers have a
           | serious background in optimisation, theoretical machine
           | learning and other related areas.
        
             | tarxzvf wrote:
             | What exactly are the right priors for general intelligence?
             | And keep in mind, whichever prior you choose, I can design
             | learning problem where it will lead you astray.
             | 
             | This paper provides some interesting results on the
             | weakness inherent in universal priors:
             | https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.04931
        
               | ac42dgu wrote:
               | Related question: What are the adversarial examples for
               | human intelligence? We know some for the visual and
               | auditory systems, but what about the arguably general
               | intelligence of humans?
               | 
               | Maybe we can work our way backwards from the adversarial
               | examples to the inductive biases?
        
               | opwieurposiu wrote:
               | I think fractional reserve banking has done a pretty good
               | job of fooling everyone.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | sdenton4 wrote:
               | 'Thinking Fast and Slow' is basically all about the rough
               | edges of human thinking.
               | 
               | The interesting tradeoff with ML systems is that you
               | trade lots of individual human crap for one big pile of
               | machine crap. The advantage of the machine crap is that
               | you can actually go in and find systemic problems and
               | work on fixing them at a 'global' level. On the human
               | side, you're always going to be stuck with an unknown
               | array of individual human biases which are incredibly
               | difficult to correct.
        
               | someguyorother wrote:
               | That's for reinforcement learning, right? What is the
               | adversarial learning problem in say, classification based
               | on Solomonoff?
               | 
               | If hypercomputation is possible, then anything based on
               | Kolmogorov complexity would be SOL, but if not... is
               | Solomonoff induction just too expensive in practice?
        
       | hivacruz wrote:
       | For making my movie quiz free of cheaters (at least most of
       | them), I tried to fool Google Images reverse search by adding
       | some noise like described here, on my movie snapshots.
       | Unfortunately it didn't work.
       | 
       | The only trick which works the most is to revert horizontally the
       | image, at random. When it works, Google is not about to find
       | similar images.
        
       | offsky wrote:
       | Combine this with Apple's new photo scanning tech and this could
       | be a new way for bad people to SWAT someone else. Assuming you
       | could fool Apples classifier, just text that manipulated image to
       | the target and they will get flagged.
       | 
       | Any image on the internet that you save to your phone is now a
       | risk to yourself, even if it looks innocent.
        
         | shadowgovt wrote:
         | This research indicates that every neural-net-classified input
         | sourced from an uncontrolled environment probably wants human
         | review (if the neural net's owner wants to minimize malicious
         | false-classifies).
        
         | ballenf wrote:
         | Probably easier to slip a "naughty" image that doesn't contain
         | a minor into the image database. An image that resides in a
         | target's iCloud storage. Or soon will.
         | 
         | Then it would take a super high level human reviewer to
         | determine that original image, although sexual in nature, is
         | not in fact illegal.
         | 
         | There are so many parties that can submit images to this
         | database, it presumably wouldn't be too hard to subvert one of
         | them with cash or laziness.
        
       | TheDudeMan wrote:
       | Can someone please ELI5 why we can't just blur every image before
       | passing it to the classifier? Wouldn't this defeat this sort of
       | attack? Obviously you lose some accuracy, but that seems
       | acceptable.
       | 
       | Edit: I guess that's similar to "image quilting" (whatever that
       | is) in this slide deck. This is the first time I've seen
       | something like this mentioned. Seems like a straight-forward
       | solution.
        
         | sebzim4500 wrote:
         | Assuming the attacker knows how you are blurring the image they
         | could do exactly the same attack.
        
         | orange3xchicken wrote:
         | It turns out that a similar technique, where you basically
         | apply noise multiple times to a single image, and average
         | predictions over all noisy images- equivalent to convolving
         | your nn with Gaussian noise yields near state of the art bounds
         | on provable robustness (under a specific class of attacks). The
         | issue is the magnitude of noise you need in order to get
         | practically robust networks is quite large relative to the data
         | you are dealing with.
         | 
         | https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.02918
         | 
         | https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.04584
        
           | TheDudeMan wrote:
           | These are the papers I've been wondering why didn't exist ;)
           | 
           | Thanks!
        
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