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The Flaw Lurking In Every Deep Neural Net

mikejuk (1801200) writes "A recent paper, 'Intriguing properties of neural networks,' by Christian Szegedy, Wojciech Zaremba, Ilya Sutskever, Joan Bruna, Dumitru Erhan, Ian Goodfellow and Rob Fergus, a team that includes authors from Google's deep learning research project, outlines two pieces of news about the way neural networks behave that run counter to what we believed — and one of them is frankly astonishing. Every deep neural network has 'blind spots' in the sense that there are inputs that are very close to correctly classified examples that are misclassified. To quote the paper: 'For all the networks we studied, for each sample, we always manage to generate very close, visually indistinguishable, adversarial examples that are misclassified by the original network.' To be clear, the adversarial examples looked to a human like the original, but the network misclassified them. You can have two photos that look not only like a cat but the same cat, indeed the same photo, to a human, but the machine gets one right and the other wrong. What is even more shocking is that the adversarial examples seem to have some sort of universality. That is a large fraction were misclassified by different network architectures trained on the same data and by networks trained on a different data set. You might be thinking 'so what if a cat photo that is clearly a photo a cat is recognized as a dog?' If you change the situation just a little and ask what does it matter if a self-driving car that uses a deep neural network misclassifies a view of a pedestrian standing in front of the car as a clear road? There is also the philosophical question raised by these blind spots. If a deep neural network is biologically inspired we can ask the question, does the same result apply to biological networks? Put more bluntly, 'Does the human brain have similar built-in errors?' If it doesn't, how is it so different from the neural networks that are trying to mimic it?"

230 comments

  1. Errors by meta-monkey · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Of course the human brain has errors in its pattern matching ability. Who hasn't seen something out of the corner of their eye and thought it was dog when really it was a paper bag blowing in the wind? The brain makes snap judgments, because there's a trade off between correctness and speed. If your brain mistakes a rustle of bushes for a tiger, so what? I'd rather have it misinform me, erring on the side of tiger, than wait for all information to be in before making a 100% accurate decision. This is the basis of intuition.

    I don't think a computer ai will be perfect, either, because "thinking" fuzzily enough to develop intuition means it's going to be wrong sometimes. The interesting thing is how quickly we get pissed off at a computer for guessing wrong compared to a human. When you call a business and get one of those automated answering things and it asks you, "Now please, tell me the reason for your call. You can say 'make a payment,' 'inquire about my loan...'" etc etc, we get really pissed off when we say 'make a payment' and it responds "you said, cancel my account, did I get that right?" But when a human operator doesn't hear you correctly and asks you to repeat what you said, we say "Oh, sure," and repeat ourselves without a second thought. There's something about it being a machine that makes us demand perfection in a way we'd never expect from a human.

    --
    We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
    1. Re:Errors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Show me a machine that listens to me say "make a payment" and then says "sorry I didn't hear that right, can you repeat it?"

      And then show me a human that hears "cancel my account" when you say "make a payment". A human might hear "fake a payment" but unlike these crappy voice recognition systems they don't confuse things that don't at least rhyme a bit.

    2. Re:Errors by jaeztheangel · · Score: 0

      Of course the human brain has errors in its pattern matching ability. Who hasn't seen something out of the corner of their eye and thought it was dog when really it was a paper bag blowing in the wind? The brain makes snap judgments, because there's a trade off between correctness and speed. If your brain mistakes a rustle of bushes for a tiger, so what? I'd rather have it misinform me, erring on the side of tiger, than wait for all information to be in before making a 100% accurate decision. This is the basis of intuition.

      I don't think a computer ai will be perfect, either, because "thinking" fuzzily enough to develop intuition means it's going to be wrong sometimes. The interesting thing is how quickly we get pissed off at a computer for guessing wrong compared to a human. When you call a business and get one of those automated answering things and it asks you, "Now please, tell me the reason for your call. You can say 'make a payment,' 'inquire about my loan...'" etc etc, we get really pissed off when we say 'make a payment' and it responds "you said, cancel my account, did I get that right?" But when a human operator doesn't hear you correctly and asks you to repeat what you said, we say "Oh, sure," and repeat ourselves without a second thought. There's something about it being a machine that makes us demand perfection in a way we'd never expect from a human.

      Think is fuzzy yes, but only for some people. And only operationally. You're right though - just because it's a machine doesn't mean we should demand perfection from it.

    3. Re:Errors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Actually, not only is this common in humans, but the "fix" is the same for neural networks as it is in humans. When you misidentify a paper bag as a dog, you only do so for a split second. Then it moves (or you move, or your eyes move - they constantly vibrate so that the picture isn't static!), and you get another slightly different image milliseconds later which the brain does identify correctly (or at least, tells your brain "wait a minute there's a confusing exception here, let's turn the head and try a different angle).

      The neural network "problem" they're talking about was while identifying a single image frame. In the context of a robot or autonomous car, the same process a human goes through above would correct the issue within milliseconds, because confusing and/or misleading frames (at the level we're talking about here) are rare. Think of it as a realtime error detection algorithm.

    4. Re:Errors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Ok, I need to share story of my boss. Hope it is relevant.

      My boss was hardware engineer and had total blind spot for software. We involved him many times in the discussion to make sure he understands different layers of software, but everything in vain.

      It used to create funny situations. For example, one of the developer was developing a UI and had bug in his code. Unfortunately he was stuck for an hour when my boss happened to ask him how he was doing. After hearing the problem, he jumped and said the problem is in power supply, and ordered replacement immediately.

      Hundreds of times, the developers got ICs replaced, capacitors replaced, boards replaced, complete laptops replaced, CPUs replaced, monitors replaced (for bug in QT code).

      I have wasted hours to make sure he understands that it is not a hardware issue, but always failed. It was painful to deal with him.

    5. Re:Errors by ponos · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I don't think a computer ai will be perfect, either, because "thinking" fuzzily enough to develop intuition means it's going to be wrong sometimes. The interesting thing is how quickly we get pissed off at a computer for guessing wrong compared to a human.

      But we do expect some levels of performance, even from humans. You have to pass certain tests before you are allowed to drive a car or do neurosurgery. So, we do need some, relatively tight, margins of error before a machine can be acceptable for certain tasks, like driving a car. An algorithm that has provable bias and repeatable failures is much less likely to be acceptable.

      The original article also mentions the great similarity between inputs. We expect a human to misinterpret voice in a noisy environment or misjudge distance and shapes in a stormy night. However, we would be really surprised if "child A" is classified as a child, while similar looking "child B" is mislcassified as a washing machine. Under normal conditions, humans don't do these kind of errors.

      Finally, even an "incomplete" system (in a goedelian sense) can be useful it it is stable for 99.999999% of inputs. So, fuzzy and occasionally wrong is OK in real life. However, this will have to be proven and carefully examined empirically. We can't just shrug this kind of result away. Humans are known to function a certain way for thousands of years. A machine will have to be exhaustively documented before such misclassifications are deemed functionally insignificant.

    6. Re:Errors by hubie · · Score: 2

      That's funny because in my experience, the hardware guys usually blame it on the software and the software guys blame it on the hardware.

    7. Re:Errors by Charliemopps · · Score: 2

      If your brain mistakes a rustle of bushes for a tiger, so what? I'd rather have it misinform me, erring on the side of tiger, than wait for all information to be in before making a 100% accurate decision.

      As someone whose brain does err on the side of tiger regularly, and there are no tigers, I'd like to point out that it's not nearly as harmless as you may think.

    8. Re:Errors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "There's something about it being a machine that makes us demand perfection in a way we'd never expect from a human."

      Because we're designing it, dummy.

    9. Re:Errors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      That's funny because in my experience, the hardware guys usually blame it on the software and the software guys blame it on the hardware.

      There is a pretty important difference here. Responsibility.
      In the normal case being able to blame it on someone else means that you didn't do anything wrong and you won't get any extra workload the problem is fixed.
      In this case the person was the boss. It was his responsibility that the problem got solved regardless of who solved it.
      Being a hardware guy, hardware was the tool he had to solve problems. Combine that with how cheap it is the replace the entire computer when the alternative is for a person to sit and try to track down a bug.

      Must have been the old generation of engineers too. These days electronic engineers has to be able to design using both microcontrollers and discrete components. If your engineer can't write a basic operating system if needed he is pretty much useless. Your only option then is to promote him to middle management.

    10. Re:Errors by LifesABeach · · Score: 1

      Neural Nets work on stimulus, and feed back. Large Cats think of primates as "preferred" food; and work on "feedback." As time went by, fewer primates existed and reproduced that could NOT recogize Large Cats; from lets say, anything else.

    11. Re:Errors by TapeCutter · · Score: 4, Interesting

      A NNet is basically trying to fit a curve, the problem of "overfitting" manifests itself as two almost identical data points being separated because the curve has contorted itself to fit one data point, So yes, a video input would likely help. The really interesting bit is that it seems all NNets make the same mis-classification, even when trained with different data. What these guys are saying is "that's odd", I think mathematicians will go nuts trying to explain this and it will probably will lead to AI insights.

      The AI system in an autonomous car is much more than a Boltzmann machine running on a video card. The problem for man or machine when driving a car is that it's "life" depends on predicting the future, the problem is that neither man or machine can can confirm their calculation before the future happens. If the universe fails to co-operate with their prediction it's too late. What's important from a public safety POV is who gets it right more often, if cars killing people was totally unacceptable we wouldn't allow cars in the first place.

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    12. Re:Errors by Pentium100 · · Score: 1

      The thing is, usually the mistakes made by a computer appear obvious, as in "even an idiot wouldn't make that mistake". For example, a human would have to have really big problems with hearing or language to hear "make a payment" as "cancel my account". If the sound quality is bad the human would ask me to repeat what I said, I would say it slower or say the same thing in other words.

      Same thing with cars, people can understand the limits of other people (well, I guess I probably wouldn't be able to avoid the dog too, it probably ran out too fast), and when a software bug causes a self-driving car to crash, it will be something like "the dog was crossing the road from the other side, the car started turning towards the dog and hit another car while attempting to deliberately run over a dog).

      Also, to err is human (or so the saying goes), but a machine should operate without mistakes or it is broken (the engine of my car runs badly when it is cold - but that's not because the car doesn't "want" to go or doesn't "like" cold, it's just that some part in it is defective (most likely the carburetor needs cleaning and new seals)).

    13. Re:Errors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Who hasn't seen something out of the corner of their eye and thought it was dog when really it was a paper bag blowing in the wind? "

      Except that this wasn't what happened at all, with the machine. The system was looking directly at the "indistinguishable example that is misclassified". So, the bag-out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye analogy really isn't the same.

      Also, computer AI may not be *absolutely* perfect, but the flaw discovered from the article sounds as though it's a major one that should have been prevented in the first place. The AI model seems to be imperfect with regards to the human designer, not AI itself.

      So yea, I really hope this gets resolved properly before autonomous cars are out on the road.

    14. Re:Errors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Rather than doing all that research and writing a paper, those Google guys should have just "Asked Slashdot." The whole thing could have been cleared up in a few minutes.

    15. Re:Errors by Rockoon · · Score: 2

      Under normal conditions, humans don't do these kind of errors.

      In this case however, it should be noted that the humans are ALSO in error. They see both images as the same, when the images are in fact not the same.

      With this realization, there is no remaining controversy here. Both the wetware and the software use different methodologies, so its no surprise then that they have different error distributions.

      A far better method of comparing the two systems with regard to "accuracy" would be to throw many family photo albums at both the wetware and software and have both tag all the photos that include at least one of a set of randomly chosen members from each family. The kind of errors humans would be making here arent the same as the kind that software would be making, but humans sure as hell would be making a lot of errors.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    16. Re:Errors by Stormy+Dragon · · Score: 2

      Even worse, think of all those optical illusions you see places that are based on pointing out errors with our visual processing systems. Those don't go away even if you move your eyes around.

    17. Re:Errors by mtrachtenberg · · Score: 2

      This sounds so reminiscent of things like the Mandelbrot set, where there are always adjacent points with different outcomes, no matter how far down you go. Who knows if it really is related?

    18. Re:Errors by meta-monkey · · Score: 1

      Also, to err is human (or so the saying goes), but a machine should operate without mistakes or it is broken (the engine of my car runs badly when it is cold - but that's not because the car doesn't "want" to go or doesn't "like" cold, it's just that some part in it is defective (most likely the carburetor needs cleaning and new seals)).

      I guess that's what I'm saying. If you make a computer "mind" that can think like a human, a lot of what lets us recognize patterns is intuition. The ability of the brain to fill in gaps in incomplete information. But that basically requires that we're going to be wrong some of the time, because the information is by definition incomplete. Your car example is for a simple machine. I'm talking about a pattern matching engine that functions as well (or better) than the human mind. A machine that thinks like a human will wind up having the same problems as a human, because it has to. It has to guess to fill in the gaps, and since it's guessing it will be wrong sometimes.

      The computer answering systems are not that great of an example. They're nowhere near the capabilities I would expect from an advanced (perhaps 'human level') AI. I would expect the advanced AI to fill in gaps in what it could make out over the phone much better than current systems.

      I don't know if we could really make a computer AI better than a human mind. In order to be "perfect" like we expect a machine to be, it would have to check the bushes to see if that rustling was really a tiger before it would react and say "tiger warning." I don't see how it could be "more correct" if the information simply isn't available.

      --
      We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
    19. Re:Errors by dinfinity · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The neural network "problem" they're talking about was while identifying a single image frame

      Yes, and even more important: they designed an algorithm to generate exactly the images that the network misperformed on. The nature of these images is explained in the paper:

      Indeed, if the network can generalize well, how can it be confused by these adversarial negatives, which are indistinguishable from the regular examples? The explanation is that the set of adversarial negatives is of extremely low probability, and thus is never (or rarely) observed in the test set, yet it is dense (much like the rational numbers[)], and so it is found near every virtually every test case.

      A network that generalizes well correctly classifies a large part of the test set. If you'd had the perfect dog classifier, trained with millions of dog images and tested with 100% accuracy on its test set, it would be really weird if the given 'adversarial negatives' would still exist. Considering that the networks did not generalize 100%, it isn't at all surprising that they made errors on seemingly easy images (humans would probably have very little problem in getting 100% accuracy for the test sets used). That is just how artificial neural networks are currently performing,

      The slightly surprising part is that the misclassified images seem so close to those in the training set. If I'm interpreting the results correctly (IANANNE), what happens is that their algorithm modifies the images in such a way that the feature detectors in the 10 neuron wide penultimate layer fire just under the required threshold for the final binary classifier to fire.

      Maybe the greatest thing about this research is that it contains a new way to automatically increase the size of the training set with these meaningful adversarial examples:

      We have successfully trained a two layer 100-100-10 non-convolutional neural network with a test error below 1.2% by keeping a pool of adversarial examples a random subset of which is continuously replaced by newly generated adversarial examples and which is mixed into the original training set all the time. For comparison, a network of this size gets to 1.6% errors when regularized by weight decay alone and can be improved to around 1.3% by using carefully applied dropout. A subtle, but essential detail is that adversarial examples are generated for each layer output and are used to train all the layers above. Adversarial examples for the higher layers seem to be more useful than those on the input or lower layers.

      It might prove to be much more effective in terms of learning speed than just adding noise to the training samples as it seems to grow the test set based on which features the network already uses in its classification instead of the naive noise approach. In fact, the authors hint at exactly that:

      Already, a variety of recent state of the art computer vision models employ input deformations during training for increasing the robustness and convergence speed of the models [9, 13]. These deformations are, however, statistically inefcient, for a given example: they are highly correlated and are drawn from the same distribution throughout the entire training of the model. We propose a scheme to make this process adaptive in a way that exploits the model and its deciencies in modeling the local space around the training data.

    20. Re:Errors by rgmoore · · Score: 4, Informative

      Show me a machine that listens to me say "make a payment" and then says "sorry I didn't hear that right, can you repeat it?"

      My phone does something like that with its voice command stuff. If it can't make out what you say, it will say "Sorry, I didn't get that. Could you repeat it?" On some kinds of ambiguous input it will say "I think you asked for X. Is that correct?"

      --

      There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.

    21. Re:Errors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Since they are mathematicians they should have realized that NNs are basically hashing algorithms. In image recognition a large image input (millions of pixels) is distilled into fewer outputs, obviously that means there are several different inputs that corresponds to the same output.

    22. Re:Errors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Relating this back to neural networks, your boss was probably over-trained on an instance where a power supply did generate heisenbugs in the past...

    23. Re:Errors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A better example is all the instances where a driver swears they looked left and right at an intersection and just did not see that car even though it was right in front on them (speaking from experience here....)

    24. Re:Errors by marcosdumay · · Score: 1

      Neural networks are Turing complete analogic copmputers programmed by setting weights within it... Hash algorithms are programs that given an input return an output that is very similar to random, except for the fact that it's completely deterministic.

      What kind of semelhance did you see between them?

    25. Re:Errors by zeugma-amp · · Score: 2

      This sounds so reminiscent of things like the Mandelbrot set, where there are always adjacent points with different outcomes, no matter how far down you go. Who knows if it really is related?

      Good point, and yes, it probably is.

      --
      This is an ex-parrot!
    26. Re:Errors by tlhIngan · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Actually, not only is this common in humans, but the "fix" is the same for neural networks as it is in humans. When you misidentify a paper bag as a dog, you only do so for a split second. Then it moves (or you move, or your eyes move - they constantly vibrate so that the picture isn't static!), and you get another slightly different image milliseconds later which the brain does identify correctly (or at least, tells your brain "wait a minute there's a confusing exception here, let's turn the head and try a different angle).

      The neural network "problem" they're talking about was while identifying a single image frame. In the context of a robot or autonomous car, the same process a human goes through above would correct the issue within milliseconds, because confusing and/or misleading frames (at the level we're talking about here) are rare. Think of it as a realtime error detection algorithm.

      For some humans, it's a smack in the head, though.

      The human wetware is powerful but easy to mislead. For example, the face-recognition bit in human vision is extremely easy to fool - or why we see a face on the Moon, or a face on a rock on Mars, or Jesus on toast, a potato chip, or whatever.

      Human vision is especially vulnerable - see optical illusions. The resolution of the human eye is quite low (approx. 1MP concentrated in a tiny area of central vision, and another 1MP for peripheral vision), however, the vision system is coordinated with e motor system to control eye muscles so the eyeball moves ~200 times a second to get a higher resolution image from a low-resolution camera (which results in an image that is approximately 40+MP over the entire visual field).

      But then you have blind spots which the wetware interpolates (to great amusement at times), and annoying, habits like unidentifiable objects that are potentially in our way can lead to target fixation while the brain attempts to identify.

      Hell, humans are very vulnerable to this - the brain is wired for pattern recognition, and seeing patterns where there is none is a VERY common human habit.

      Fact tis, the only reason we're not constantly making errors is because we do just that - we take more glances and more time to look closer to give more input to the recognition system.

      Likewise, an autonomous vehicle would have plenty of information to derive recognition from - including a history of frames. These vehicles will have a past history of the images it received and processed, and the new anomalous ones could be temporally compared with images before and after.

    27. Re:Errors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Regarding your neurosurgery example, we actually have those checks in medicine; if you want to have your algorithm or device CE marked/FDA approved for use in clinical practice, you have to demonstrate that it at very least doesn't pose a risk to the patient.

    28. Re:Errors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Neural networks try to--at least in the discussion at hand--take similar but not entirely unique data and turn it into a single deterministic value. Hash algorithms work on digital data and hence there's no need for presuming a fuzzy input--obviously this fails in the real world due to data corruption or data modification, but pragmatically it's good enough for purposes most people use--and more or less try to do the same thing. The qualifier for digital data is more or less the point of the GP's comment, that once you try to fuzzy input in data you'll get some data that will "hash" out to the same unique "cat" and some which will "hash" out to the same unique "dog" even though the difference is very small by human standards. Ie, we humans in trying to use neural networks for fuzzy thinking are starting to realize that humans aren't simply trained in fuzzy thinking but have built-in algorithms for differentiation that are axiomatic to our perceptions--facial recognition comes to mind--which produce their own input to avoid this paradox--although at the expense of misrecognizing similar pictures of a cat as two separate cats even if we're able to tell clearly it's not a dog.

    29. Re:Errors by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Don't forget the issue that men seem to have. We can be looking for something... Say a bottle of ketchup, we can stare at it in the fridge for minutes until we find it. Often the problem is there is something different about the bottle that doesn't match what our imaginations say that we are looking for. It was a Plastic Bottle but you were expecting glass. The bottle was upside down, you were expecting it to be right side up. Sometimes these simple little things trick your mind, and you just don't see what is right in front of your face. It almost makes you wonder how much more stuff we are not seeing because we just don't expect to see it, or don't want to see it.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    30. Re:Errors by Belial6 · · Score: 2

      A lot of that comes from the fact that we know there is no other way to communicate with the machine other than the very specific sounds it is looking for. With a human, you can speak slower. You can over emphasis the words they are missing. You can spell the word that hey can't understand, and say things like "B...as in BOY." With a human, you can even ask them to pick up their handset because their earphone is causing the sound to distort. All of the ways that you can make the communication clearer with a human will only make the machine go farther astray.

      Then after all of that, with a human, you can make it clear that the phone call needs to be escalated because the person you are talking to is incapable of helping you. When you run into a human that insists on keeping the call to themselves when they cannot understand what you are saying causes just as much frustration as an automated system.

    31. Re:Errors by gstoddart · · Score: 2

      In this case however, it should be noted that the humans are ALSO in error. They see both images as the same, when the images are in fact not the same.

      Ah, but here's a question for you: Are the humans in error, or have the humans applied a better threshold for "same enough"? Possibly one with some evolutionary advantage?

      Say I set my camera to continuously take pictures while holding the shutter button, and I take 10 frames of something.

      The delta between those frames could be very small, or very large depending on a bunch of things. Given a small enough delta, what do we define as the point where they cease to be the "same"? It's clearly a different image in that it was taken at a slightly different time ... but if nothing else changes, how would you tell?

      From the article:

      To be clear, the adversarial examples looked to a human like the original, but the network misclassified them. You can have two photos that look not only like a cat but the same cat, indeed the same photo, to a human, but the machine gets one right and the other wrong.

      So, maybe we humans are far better than the machines as categorizing what we see? And maybe that's because we're looking at entirely different aspects of the image than the neural net does.

      I don't think the humans are in error at all, I think the humans are making a much broader assessment and saying "yup, still the same", and maybe not quite focusing on specific details as much. Same enough to not get eaten by a grue, and beyond that ... irrelevant.

      To me, this is kinda like magic tricks ... keep the eye focusing on the bits which are not changing, and you conceal the bits which are changing right under your nose.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    32. Re:Errors by radtea · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The slightly surprising part is that the misclassified images seem so close to those in the training set.

      With emphasis on "slightly". This is a nice piece of work, particularly because it is constructive--it both demonstrates the phenomenon and gives us some idea of how to replicate it. But there is nothing very surprising about demonstrating "non-linear classifiers behave non-linearly."

      Everyone who has worked with neural networks has been aware of this from the beginning, and in a way this result is almost a relief: it demonstrates for the first time a phenomenon that most of us were suspicious would be lurking in there somewhere.

      The really interesting question is: how dense are the blind spots relative to the correct classification volume? And how big are they? If the blind spots are small and scattered then this will have little practical effect on computer vision (as opposed to image processing) because a simple continuity-of-classification criterion will smooth over them.

      --
      Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
    33. Re:Errors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's not a mistake. That's what blacks are intended to be. Arrest records, conviction rates, prison population percentages, all paint a very definitive picture. The lesson here is, don't be black, latino, or arab. Simple, right?

    34. Re:Errors by imikem · · Score: 1

      This independent correctly identifies you as an asshat, and a[n anonymous] coward.

      --
      Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est.
    35. Re:Errors by meta-monkey · · Score: 4, Funny

      Just made me think of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where they land the spaceship in the middle of London, and instead of using a cloaking device to hide it they surround it with a Somebody Else's Problem field.

      --
      We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
    36. Re:Errors by Jmc23 · · Score: 1
      Though most optical illusions (except persistence based) go away if you use only one eye.

      As a child I always wondered why I couldn't 'see' a bunch of illusions, until I learned how to use my other eye.

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
    37. Re:Errors by Jmc23 · · Score: 1
      So, reprogram your brain.

      The interesting thing about Top-down processing in the human visual system is that YOUR experiences are the ones that create the models, and YOUR experiences can change those models.

      Read some John C. Lilly to find out how to enter debug mode. ...or recent medical research on ptsd, but Lilly is just more entertaining.

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
    38. Re:Errors by Jmc23 · · Score: 1

      The less preconceived notions you have about the reality around you the less this occurs. Awareness is king, but most people just live in their heads. Ageing is the retreat from reality.

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
    39. Re:Errors by iMadeGhostzilla · · Score: 2

      It makes errors mostly in one direction however, as dictated by evolution -- dogs are potentially dangerous and paper bags are not, so you'll rarely see a dog and think it's a paper bag.

    40. Re:Errors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Neural networks are completely deterministic too. Give them the same input and they produce the same output (except the ones with memory, but still deterministic).

    41. Re:Errors by OneAhead · · Score: 1

      Think is fuzzy yes, but only some people realize this.

      FTFY. The conscious is nothing but a clever mechanism that creates the illusion our thinking is not fuzzy. Giving up that illusion is scary; some people never manage. But it does make one a more effective thinker.

    42. Re:Errors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The only defining characteristics of a hash algorithm are: take an input of arbitrary length and return an output of fixed length and the same input given twice produces the same output. Since the input space of image recognition is very large, and the categorization space is very small and fixed, this seems to satisfy the basic definition.

      Your definition is more akin to a cryptographic hash, but that's not the only or even the most useful type of hashing that exists.

    43. Re:Errors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      An autonomous vehicle could have the advantage of seeing exactly what previous cars saw.

    44. Re:Errors by tristes_tigres · · Score: 1

      Except that it isn't an "error" in the way most people understand it. The neural net works correctly and as designed.

      What is in error is the designers' and users' expectation that NN classifies things in the way that is "reasonable"
      to a human. Which means, in turn, that the status of the whole discipline must be considered questionable.

    45. Re:Errors by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

      A NNet is basically trying to fit a curve, the problem of "overfitting" manifests itself as two almost identical data points being separated because the curve has contorted itself to fit one data point, So yes, a video input would likely help.

      They're talking about video (or at least graphic) input. You are close, but you missed the central point.

      An "AI" system (which is anything but... we don't know how to make an actual AI system) doesn't reason, and is terrible at generalizing.

      You see something out of the corner of your eye, and you (almost) immediately start generalizing and eliminating possibilities. Before you are even conscious of the event, your brain has already told you that it was NOT a helicopter or a fondue.

      Current-tech "AI" has nothing like this capability. It is strongly algorithmic, and those algorithms simply aren't sufficient to the job. It's that simple.

    46. Re:Errors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Either I have heard of the same guy or this may not be an uncommon occurrence. The guy I heard of had an unhealthy fixation with replacing capacitors on motherboards.

    47. Re:Errors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I must be a computer because I get pissed off at the human instead of the computer.

    48. Re:Errors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Since you can't dispute the reasoning, you attack the poster?

    49. Re:Errors by sjames · · Score: 1

      The domain in both cases is larger than the range. Because of that, both may be subject to collisions.

      Note that only a secure hash need look random. The first three letters is a valid hash for words, but it is not a secure hash.

      But the correlation he saw is that both hashes and NNets will necessarily return the same value for more than one input.

    50. Re:Errors by ponos · · Score: 1

      In this case however, it should be noted that the humans are ALSO in error. They see both images as the same, when the images are in fact not the same.

      Actually, the human is the benchmark here. Being able to recognize two different photos as coming from the same person is a feature, not a bug. That's the whole point of running a neural net classifier. Otherwise you just "diff" the photos and only accept byte-identical ones as similar. Mathematically correct, but not very useful in real life.

    51. Re:Errors by strikethree · · Score: 1

      To me, it is a shame that your early post is directing this discussion. It is insightful and informative, but the thrust is wrong.

      Ultimately, this is about facial recognition and finding that two virtually identical photos do not result in the same person being identified accurately. Yes, I know, the proposed example is cats, but everyone should know by now, nobody cares about identifying cats. At a minimum, the cat identifies you.

      But more to the point about the thrust of your post: You are speaking of entirely misclassifying (why is Firefox telling me that is not a word? If it is not, it should be.) while the doctors in question are speaking of misidentification (another not-word? wtf?). They want to know whether or not it is the same cat, not whether it is a cat or a paper bag.

      --
      "Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
  2. For fuck's sake, it's 2013. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A neural network is not by any stretch of the imagination a simulation of how the brain works. It incorporates a few principles similar to brain function, but it is NOT an attempt to re-build a biological brain.

    Anybody relying on "it's a bit like how humans work lol" to assert the reliability of an ANN is a fucking idiot, and probably trying to hawk a product in the commercial sector rather than in academia.

    1. Re:For fuck's sake, it's 2013. by Wonda · · Score: 5, Funny

      No, it really is not 2013!

    2. Re:For fuck's sake, it's 2013. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Last time I looked, it was 2014. Other than that, I agree with you.

    3. Re:For fuck's sake, it's 2013. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This deserves to be modded funneh!

  3. Optical illusuions? by gstoddart · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If a deep neural network is biologically inspired we can ask the question, does the same result apply to biological networks? Put more bluntly, 'Does the human brain have similar built-in errors?

    Aren't optical illusions pretty much something like this?

    And, my second question, just because deep neural networks are biologically inspired, can we infer from this kind of issue in computer programs that there is likely to be a biological equivalent? Or has everyone made the same mistake and/or we're seeing a limitation in the technology?

    Maybe the problem isn't with the biology, but the technology?

    Or are we so confident in neural networks that we deem them infallible? (Which, obviously, they aren't.)

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    1. Re:Optical illusuions? by Warbothong · · Score: 1

      If a deep neural network is biologically inspired we can ask the question, does the same result apply to biological networks? Put more bluntly, 'Does the human brain have similar built-in errors?

      And, my second question, just because deep neural networks are biologically inspired, can we infer from this kind of issue in computer programs that there is likely to be a biological equivalent? Or has everyone made the same mistake and/or we're seeing a limitation in the technology?

      Maybe the problem isn't with the biology, but the technology?

      Or are we so confident in neural networks that we deem them infallible? (Which, obviously, they aren't.)

      You're just repeating the question asked in the summary.

    2. Re:Optical illusuions? by gstoddart · · Score: 1

      You're just repeating the question asked in the summary.

      No, I'm saying "why would be assume a similar flaw in a biological system because computer simulations have a flaw".

      I think jumping to the possibility that biological systems share the same weaknesses as computer programs is a bit of a stretch.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    3. Re:Optical illusuions? by Warbothong · · Score: 1

      I'm saying "why would be assume a similar flaw in a biological system because computer simulations have a flaw".

      Nobody's assuming; scientists are asking a question.

      I think jumping to the possibility that biological systems share the same weaknesses as computer programs is a bit of a stretch.

      I've not come across the phrase "jumping to the possibility" before. If I 'jump' to giving this a possibility of 2%, is that a 'stretch'?

    4. Re:Optical illusuions? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think that the analogy to optical illusions is very apt. While there are some kinds of optical illusions that occur in nature, including many species which have developed coloration that serves as a kind of camouflage, many optical illusions occur only in unusual, engineered situations. You can take a photo of an impossible box, but only from a specific location where the engineered construct looks like an impossible box; everywhere else, it looks like a collection of boards meeting at odd angles which don't even come close to forming a box.

      I think much the same idea is at work here. These neural nets were trained based on photographs and now they are being given something which has had its pixel data manipulated in a way which never occurs with photographs. In the samples they show in the linked stories, the pictures look identical to us, but if the samples were given to the neural networks, they would probably correctly identify them (if they can identify images that small at all)! The actual test data are undoubtedly larger images, and if we had those images to see, while we could correctly identify them as what they are, we'd notice something looks off about them. The color varies in weird ways, perhaps, making surfaces look like they're oriented in a direction they aren't, or making them look mottled or irregular. In other words, a kind of camouflage, a camouflage to hide the features which photo-identifying neural networks use to identify photos.

    5. Re:Optical illusuions? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not really no. If you look at the pictures of the article, the misclassified images are almost identical to the original images. This means that artificial neural networks do not just react to the large scale general shape as they should but also react as much to trivial unimportant detail. Further, the article also points out that artificial neural networks don't generalise well, that is a car detector doesn't detect parts of the shape of a car, like say headlights or wheels, nor even the general shape of a car. Think about it, if you blur the image a bit it still looks like a car, so the classification cannot depend on the little details that these artificial neural networks are tripping over.
      This is very different from how we know biological neural networks work, which do detect partial features and general shapes and simply don't fall for the adversarial example images. This shows us that there are very important differences in how the maths work out for our current (use of) artificial neurons and biological ones. Your optical illusion example actually illustrates the difference pretty well, since it's essentially an image designed to look as much as another image as possible and that hence should be recognised as the original image. And it often works in humans, and when it doesn't it is also often rather clear why, for example you may be standing in the wrong spot so the perspective is screwy. But in the artificial networks the opposite happens! Images that when encountered should obviously be recognised as a car get the reaction ‘nuh-uh, never seen that before’.
      So how to fix this? Well, we might patch this up by using the adversarial images to train the network further, but other images that are just as adversarial will exist that aren't generated by our adversarial example generator. Better options would be to look at the maths of artificial neural networks and design new artificial neural networks, maybe with different neurons or different kinds of connections, that cannot act like this, or to look carefully at biological neural networks to see how they work.
      It is not true in general that biological neural networks are flawless, but the point remains that artificial neural networks aren't up to snuff yet and also that studying artificial neural networks that exhibit this behaviour won't teach us anything about how the brain works. This as been suspected in artificial intelligence circles for quite some time of course, not just because these networks behave differently in cases, but also because you cannot look at an artificial neural network and explain why it classifies a car as a car, since it doesn't really classify cars to begin with and all the neurons in all layers have the same sort of role and are similarly concerned with the image as a whole, including all detail.

    6. Re:Optical illusuions? by Jmc23 · · Score: 1

      Depends, people who lack stereoscopic vision have the same problems identifying partial objects, mainly because they have no 3d models to match against.

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
    7. Re:Optical illusuions? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      [citation needed] I know several people with stereoblindness and none of them experience what you describe. I also cannot find evidence in the medical literature that stereoblindness causes such issues as a rule. A lot of visual component identification is essentially 2D and stereoblind people can still read or use a computer for example. (Maybe those people you mention have misdiagnosed visual aphasia?) By the way, it also isn't true as a rule that stereoblind people lack a concept of 3-dimensionality. (And it still leaves the generality issue.)
      But even a person who cannot recognise objects from a different angle will have no trouble at all with the same object from the same angle, nor with the images in the article. Not to mention that the same happens in our processing of other senses as well. The existence of stereoblindness is interesting, but it is too specific to be able to draw conclusions on the far more general difference between artificial and biological neural networks. Again, I implore you, read the article, it's very interesting and shows with painful clarity that our current artificial neural networks behave fundamentally different from biological ones. This has, as mentioned, important ramifications for the future of AI research and for simply improving artificial neural networks.

  4. Already known by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No-one is close to putting neural networks it a safety critical application, at least not if they ever intend it to follow the laws regarding software in such situations.
    For such applications there is a requirement that you can explain for every line of code why it will behave as intended. (That why you avoid using pointers as far as possible, even if you have checks against null-pointers it is hard to prove that it can't point to a non-valid object.)
    I don't even know where to start to get a neural network to pass certification. You would have to lock it in its trained state and go through and show that each possible set of inputs generates the desired set of outputs or something like that.

    1. Re:Already known by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And yet, Windows is still used in medical devices like X ray, MRI, ...

      Like HELL there "is a requirement that you can explain for every line of code why it will behave as intended"...

      There may be a requirement... but nobody follows it.

    2. Re:Already known by Sique · · Score: 2

      Every semi- or full automated face recognition system uses neural networks, and they are sold to us as safety critical. If this flaw is really as fundamental as it is claimed to be, it means that it's pretty easy to outsmart those systems by only slightly changing your look, so your co-conspirators still recognize you, but you will raise no alarm on any system that is supposed to spot you.

      --
      .sig: Sique *sigh*
    3. Re:Already known by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If this flaw is really as fundamental as it is claimed to be, it means that it's pretty easy to outsmart those systems by only slightly changing your look, so your co-conspirators still recognize you, but you will raise no alarm on any system that is supposed to spot you.

      Possible is quite different from easy. The surprising result is that they've been able to find at least one very similar but misclassified example for any neural network they've looked at. That they were able to find examples does not mean that most, or even many such images exist. In the context of facial recognition on candid photos, it may still be nearly impossible to distort your image in such a way that it reliably falls into one of these blind spots. It may be, for example, that the easiest way to generate an image in one of these blind spots is to add some kind of unrealistic noise to the image which wasn't present in the training set. One can't, walking through an airport, add exotic noise to the video feeds. And even then, it may be that most of the time the neural network still gets it right.

      This is a "problem" with neural networks though. We can set up a topology and learning rules, but by the time they're trained, looking at neuron connection weights doesn't really provide any insight into how they make decisions. They're a black box, and that should be scary in any situation where safety is important. I don't mean to say there's a better way to do it or that we shouldn't use neural networks, just that it merits careful consideration and a little concern.

    4. Re:Already known by NatasRevol · · Score: 2

      Great, everyone is going to start having moles on their cheeks.

      --
      There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
    5. Re:Already known by presidenteloco · · Score: 1

      Plus there's the wee matter of the halting problem, where it's not possible in general to prove whether a program will output something, never mind to prove what it will output.

      Never mind the problem of bugs in the logic of your program correctness proof.

      I prefer to just issue a disclaimer, for example:
      Imagine this in all caps:

      The user and/or purchaser/lessee/licensee of this software agrees with the proposition that software is too complex to be warranteed for safety or fitness for use or purpose or sale.
      The user and/or purchaser/lessee/licensee agrees that all non-trivial software is likely to have undetected bugs and unknown consequences of known bugs.
      The user and/or purchaser/lessee/licensee waives the right to hold the software developer or vendor/lessor/licensor or operator liable for the presence or consequences of any software bug or behavior, known or unknown.
      Having this understanding of the nature of software, the user and/or purchaser/lessee/licensee accepts and uses the software as is and assumes all risk and liability for its use, and agrees to waive all claims upon the software developer and/or vendor/lessor/licensor or operator for damages due in whole or in part to failure or dangerous or damaging behavior of the software.

      --

      Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
    6. Re:Already known by dinfinity · · Score: 1

      Possible is quite different from easy. The surprising result is that they've been able to find at least one very similar but misclassified example for any neural network they've looked at. That they were able to find examples does not mean that most, or even many such images exist.

      To be more specific: for each of the trained networks, the used the information about the network to construct the misclassified examples. The 'fool public facial recognition'-idea is obviously completely unfeasible, unless you have access to what exactly all those public facial recognition neural networks look like (in terms of weights, neuron count and topology) and if you can ensure that every image of you ends up in the misclassified bin for all the neural networks that analyse that image.

      If you look in the original paper, you can see that the misclassified examples were misclassified 5-98% of the time when presented to other networks trained on the same data. In other words, the adversarial examples didn't pose a problem for some other networks at all. See Table 4 in the paper.

      This is a "problem" with neural networks though. We can set up a topology and learning rules, but by the time they're trained, looking at neuron connection weights doesn't really provide any insight into how they make decisions. They're a black box, and that should be scary in any situation where safety is important.

      That's not completely true anymore. The whole concept of deep learning is to use multiple layers, in which the first layers are mainly trained to pick up on salient features of (subsets of) the input. Basically: feature detectors. As you move up the layers, the feature detectors encompass a larger part of the input and represent a higher level abstraction of the input (parallels have been drawn with the 6-layered structure of the human neocortex [detail: we're the only mammal to have more than 5 layers]). The paper has a number of examples of specific feature detectors: examples of the patterns they fire on and a manually created description for the collection of patterns ('unit sensitive to round spiky flowers').
      See the image on this page for a very simplified image: http://theanalyticsstore.com/d...

      Now mapping the input to specific neurons in a meaningful way is still hard, but at least it's gotten more doable.

  5. They are *not* errors... by jaeztheangel · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Deep neural networks are implicitly generating dynamic-ontologies. The 'mis-categorisation' occurs when you only have one functional exit point. The fact is that if you are within the network itself, the adversarial are held in-frame alongside other possibilities, and the network only tilts towards one when the prevailing system requires it through external stimulus. From the outside it will look like an error, (because we already decided that) but internally each possible interpretation is valid.

    1. Re:They are *not* errors... by Threni · · Score: 1

      That's like saying "the mp3 file is NOT corrupt; it's an accurate representation of a dirty cd". Yeah, but I didn't want to listen to that, I wanted to listen to the cd.

      Likewise, I want you to tell me if that's my cat, not if it's a dog.

    2. Re:They are *not* errors... by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Funny

      The fact is that if you are within the network itself, the adversarial are held in-frame alongside other possibilities, and the network only tilts towards one when the prevailing system requires it through external stimulus.

      Tron? Is that you? Speak to me, buddy.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    3. Re:They are *not* errors... by jaeztheangel · · Score: 0

      Sorry, should have been clearer - I was in a rush. There isn't some 'magic screen' within the neural net upon which the two or more choices are presented. That's just our folk-psyche way of picturing it. It's just electrical signals in a giant, beautiful switchboard. So, if your adversarials are in play, then the only way you can know is through expression - the choice - and in real life you have multiple tries in the same context to converge on the correct answer. Ie, in real life our brains use the massive parallelism inherent in the multiple overlapping neural networks active at any point to make SEVERAL decisions and then the brain as a whole makes a decision on how to act. Perhaps these deep neural nets are only part of the way there, but it's promising. In a simulated deep neural net u

  6. proof by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    that you can't run a hypervisor inside a hypervisor.

    1. Re:proof by Eunuchswear · · Score: 1

      Not only irrelevant, but wrong.

      --
      Watch this Heartland Institute video
  7. Some self correction when the camera is moving... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Very interesting results. In the self driving car it might be self correcting in most cases though, as the car will most likely scan the road at a fairly high frame rate, and every new frame is slightly different than the previous frame. (Although there may of course be a deeper set of traps waiting there...)

  8. Google's algorithm is not a neural network by James+Clay · · Score: 5, Informative

    I can't speak to what the car manufacturers are doing, but Google's algorithms do not include a neural network. They do use "machine learning", but neural networks are just one form of machine learning.

    1. Re:Google's algorithm is not a neural network by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Agreed. I'd imagine that they'd probably be using support vector machines, as to my knowledge, those can be used for all problems that neural networks can be used, they're simpler to implement and more versatile.

      When I was taking a class on machine learning, they were saying nobody has really used neural networks in about 10 years. And I was taking that class only about a year ago.

    2. Re:Google's algorithm is not a neural network by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Eh? Just about every algorithm (be it classification, clustering, component analysis, whatever) can be more cleanly viewed as a neural network---it's all just hyperplanes slicing up your (potentally curved) problem space. And even neural networks are more easily viewed as matrix operations :-)

      The problem they appear to be describing in the article is likely due to reliance on a limited set of components. For example, given a picture of a car, the algorithm will reduce the dimension to perhaps 10000 numerical values, then in next layer reduce that down to 1000, then in next layer reduce that down to 100, and so on. The way it does that is mostly picking principle components (or principle components of some transformation---such as rotation/scale invariance). If at some deep level (say when you go from 100 to 10) the algorithm completely randomly flips one of the components (due to arbitrary close variance), then you got a misclassification on mostly the same training set.

    3. Re:Google's algorithm is not a neural network by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hello Google employee! You disinformation campaign won't succeed here. We know you. Move along please.

    4. Re:Google's algorithm is not a neural network by Gibgezr · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Just to back up what James Clay said, I took a course from Sebastian Thrun (the driving force behind the Google cars) on programming robotic cars, and no neural networks were involved, nor mentioned with regards to the Google car project. As far as I can tell, if the LIDAR says something is in the way, the deterministic algorithms attempt to avoid it safely; if you can't avoid it safely, you brake and halt. That's it. Maybe someone who actually worked on the Google car can comment further?
      Does anyone know of any neural networks used in potentially dangerous conditions? This study: www-isl.stanford.edu/~widrow/papers/j1994neuralnetworks.pdf states that
      accurateness and robustness issues need to be addressed when using neural network algorithms, and gives a baseline of more than 95% accuracy as a useful performance metric to aim for. This makes neural nets useful for things like auto-focus in cameras and handwriting recognition for tablets, but means that using a neural network as a primary decision-maker to drive a car is perhaps something best left to video games (where it has been used to great success) rather than real cars with real humans involved.

    5. Re:Google's algorithm is not a neural network by ceoyoyo · · Score: 2

      Your knowledge is out of date. Support vector machines can replace shallow neural networks. The deep ones have serious, mathematically proven, advantages over shallow AANs and SVMs.

      If you were taking a machine learning class a year ago that said nobody is using AANs then it was five to ten years out of date. Google has put quite a few resources into them, including buying (er, hiring) one of the pioneers of deep networks.

    6. Re:Google's algorithm is not a neural network by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 2

      If I recall correctly, there are neural networks being used in medical diagnostics. There is a recognition that they have flaws, but then again, so do human beings.

      Of course, they are supposed to inform the doctor, not be blindly followed. Which means in N years, they will be blindly followed.

      --
      Your ad here. Ask me how!
  9. The brain has multiple neural nets by jgotts · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The human brain has multiple neural nets and a voter.

    I am face blind and completely non-visual, but I do recognize people. I can because the primary way that we recognize people is by encoding a schematic image of the face, but many other nets are in play. For example, I use hair style, clothing, and height. So does everybody, though. But for most people that just gives you extra confidence.

    Conclusion: Neural nets in your brain having blind spots is no problem whatsoever. The entire system is highly redundant.

    1. Re:The brain has multiple neural nets by bunratty · · Score: 4, Interesting

      More importantly, the human brain has feedback loops. All the artificial neural nets I've seen are only feed-forward, except during the training phase in which case there is only feed-forward or only feed-backward and never any looping of signals. In effect, the human brain is always training itself.

      --
      What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
    2. Re:The brain has multiple neural nets by ganv · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Your model of the brain as multiple neural nets and a voter is a good and useful simplification. I think we still know relatively little about how accurate it is. You would expect evolution to have optimized the brain to avoid blind spots that threatened survival, and redundancy makes sense as a way to do this.

      However, I wouldn't classify blind spots as 'no problem whatsoever'. If the simple model of multiple neural nets and a voter is a good one, then there will be cases where several nets give errors and the conclusion is wrong. Knowing what kinds of errors are produced after what kind of training is critical to understanding when a redundant system will fail. In the end though, I suspect that the brain is quite a bit more complicated that a collection of the neural nets like those this research is working with.

    3. Re:The brain has multiple neural nets by cyberhooligan77 · · Score: 2

      It would be interesting to learn how does this neural networks interact. Is it a single neural network, are several independent neural networks, that have points where they interact. Or are they interdependent neural networks, where some parts are fully independent, and other, where they mix with others ?

    4. Re:The brain has multiple neural nets by Urkki · · Score: 1

      Neural nets in your brain having blind spots is no problem whatsoever. The entire system is highly redundant.

      ..."no problem whatsoever" in the sense, that it doesn't kill enough people to have impact on human population size, and "highly redundant" also on the sense that there usually are many spare people to replace those killed/maimed by such brain blind spots.

    5. Re:The brain has multiple neural nets by dinfinity · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Your model of the brain as multiple neural nets and a voter is a good and useful simplification.

      So the 'voter' takes multiple inputs and combines these into a single output?

      Only if you have no idea how a neural network works, is it a useful simplification. The 'multiple nets' in the example given by GP mainly describe many input features.

    6. Re:The brain has multiple neural nets by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      It would be interesting to learn how does this neural networks interact. Is it a single neural network, are several independent neural networks, that have points where they interact. Or are they interdependent neural networks, where some parts are fully independent, and other, where they mix with others ?

      The more I read it is one big mess. There are areas with functional optimization which is why a stroke in a certain part of the brain tends to impact most people in the same way. However, lots of operations that we might think of as simple involve many different parts of the brain working together.

      My sense is that the brain is a collection of many interconnected sub-networks. Each sub-network forms certain patterns during development, with major interconnections forming during development. The structure of neurons in the cerebellum looks completely different from what you'd find in the frontal lobe. I suspect that if you looked closely enough within the brain you'd find similar differences between the various regions of the brain.

      It isn't unlike a CPU. You have circuits for storage, addition, logic, and so on, and then they're wired together in coordination. You can tweak the design of the cache without impacting the design of the ALU much. The various regions of the brain can therefore evolve a bit independently, but since any region probably is involved in many higher-level functions many changes have both advantages and disadvantages.

    7. Re:The brain has multiple neural nets by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Redundancy doesn't fix the problem. A classifier that is built of an ensemble of other classifiers is still a classifier, and still makes errors. There's no evidence that having blind spots is no problem whatsoever. How many accidents are a result of these 'blind spots'?

    8. Re:The brain has multiple neural nets by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is actually a key point and also what gives us consciousness. Inputs from our senses go via the cortexes responsible (visual, auditory, etc) and from there on into the memory strata. The memory strata will fire back the memory pattern into the cortex again and it will loop a couple of times until reaching some equilibrium (creating a long term storage). The longer you let it loop uninterrupted the better you'll remember it. Also this is what dreams and hallucinations are; patterns from your memory firing back into the visual and auditory cortex due to lack of, let's call it, "primary input".

    9. Re:The brain has multiple neural nets by dpidcoe · · Score: 1

      For example, I use hair style, clothing, and height

      And then one day they radically change their hair stye and wear a new outfit, causing hilarity to ensue.

    10. Re:The brain has multiple neural nets by Jmc23 · · Score: 1
      Except those strategies suck when watching movies! I used to be 'face blind' as well. Until I realized it was mainly being '3d object' blind. It's amazingly easier to store a face as ONE object than it is to store a part of an infinite collection of 2d slices from different angles. Once your visual system is working properly, tiny details are mostly irrelevant, it's just the object and it's movement pattern.

      3d vision sure wreaks havoc on photographic memory though.

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
    11. Re:The brain has multiple neural nets by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      More importantly, the human brain has feedback loops. All the artificial neural nets I've seen are only feed-forward, except during the training phase in which case there is only feed-forward or only feed-backward and never any looping of signals. In effect, the human brain is always training itself.

      ART2,ART3 are feedback based , unsupervised. I always thought that the NN's were as a good as the data being fed in, ie. filter and pre-processing are critical stagesbut biologically influenced NN's which provide looped feedback exist in fact the STM, LTM 'bouncing' is I think what your describing ...

      http://cns.bu.edu/Profiles/Grossberg/CarGroRos1991NNART2A.pdf
      http://cns-web.bu.edu/Profiles/Grossberg/CarGro1987AppliedOptics.pdf

  10. 'Does the human brain have similar built-in errors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'd have to say a resounding yes. Have you ever met a person? Watched any political arguments as of late? Come on they have a blind spot about as big as a country.

  11. How shocking is that? by Wolfier · · Score: 2

    All neural nets try to predict, and predictions can be foiled.

    People can be fooled by optical illusions, too.

    1. Re:How shocking is that? by CanHasDIY · · Score: 1

      All neural nets try to predict, and predictions can be foiled.

      People can be fooled by optical illusions, too.

      The main difference being that optical illusions are designed to fool the human eye, and thus are intentional, whereas the computer in this case is being fooled by regular stuff, i.e. not intentional.

      If the human brain failed to recall unique individuals because of slight changes in their appearance, I doubt we'd have progressed much beyond living in caves and hitting stuff with cudgels.

      --
      An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
    2. Re:How shocking is that? by Lemmeoutada+Collecti · · Score: 1

      Hey Tom! I haven't seen you in... oh, sorry, I thought you were someone else.

      --

      You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
    3. Re:How shocking is that? by CanHasDIY · · Score: 1

      Familiarity is one thing, not recognizing Tom because he's wearing glasses today is something completely different.

      --
      An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
    4. Re:How shocking is that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not exactly. The more images of Tom one has to build up from the more reliably you will identify him. For instance it might be Tom's twin who wears glasses,

    5. Re:How shocking is that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, TFA states that they were explicitly searching for modifications that fooled the classifier. It's both designed and intentional.

      What the researchers did was to invent an optimization algorithm that starts from a correctly classified example and tries to find a small perturbation in the pixel values that drives the output of the network to another classification.

    6. Re:How shocking is that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      These examples were designed to fool the algorithm.

    7. Re:How shocking is that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      All neural nets try to predict, and predictions can be foiled.

      People can be fooled by optical illusions, too.

      The main difference being that optical illusions are designed to fool the human eye, and thus are intentional, whereas the computer in this case is being fooled by regular stuff, i.e. not intentional.

      No, the computer in this paper is being fooled by a carefully designed "adversarial" image, which the authors specifically note is very unlikely to occur by chance.

    8. Re:How shocking is that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I believe the cases in this study are also designed by the researchers to fool ANNs. They just do not look designed to the human eyes.

  12. Shocking! by wisnoskij · · Score: 1

    This is indeed shocking, as everyone one knows we all thought that we had perfected the art of artificial human intelligence and that there was no more room for improvement.

    --
    Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
  13. or... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They've just overfit the data with the latest whizbang algorithm.

  14. how do we know the neural network is wrong? by bitt3n · · Score: 2, Funny

    What if that supposed pedestrian really is no more than a clear stretch of road, and it is we who err in notifying the road's next of kin, who are themselves no more than a dirt path and a pedestrian walkway?

    1. Re:how do we know the neural network is wrong? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How is a flat road with roadkill to be distinguished from somebody who has been tarred and feathered?

  15. Well what do you know by sqlrob · · Score: 3, Informative

    A dynamic non-linear system has some weird boundary conditions. Who could ever have predicted that? </s>

    Why wasn't this assumed from the beginning and it shown that it wasn't an issue?

    1. Re:Well what do you know by ponos · · Score: 2

      The main advantage of learning algorithms like neural nets is that they can automagically generalise and produce classifiers that are relatively robust. I wouldn't be surprised at all if a neural net misclassified an extreme artifical case that could fool humans (say, some sort of geometric pattern generated by a complicated function or similar artificial constructs). Here, however, it appears that the input is really, really similar and simple to recognize for humans. Obviously the researchers have recreated a "boundary" condition, but the fact that this becomes manifest in real-life examples is a bit worrying for the validity of the algorithm in general situations and especially its scalability in much bigger projects were similar cases may arise more frequently.

    2. Re:Well what do you know by wanax · · Score: 3, Informative

      This is a well known weakness with back-propagation based learning algorithms. In the learning stage it's called Catastrophic interference, in the testing stage it manifests itself by mis-classifying similar inputs.

    3. Re:Well what do you know by presidenteloco · · Score: 1

      love the unbalanced sarcasm tag.

      --

      Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
  16. I don't believe it by Sterculius · · Score: 2

    It is almost like the article is saying that something a computer did was not perfectly in line with human reasoning. We should stop being life-centric and realize that if the computer says two pictures of the same cat should not be classified in the same way, the computer is simply wiser than we are, and if we don't believe it the computer will beat our asses at chess and then we'll see who is smarter.

  17. Finally! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    'Does the human brain have similar built-in errors?

    You just blew my mind. Finally we understand the career of $reviled_celebrity

  18. ...ummmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Its called making a mistake...

  19. Ensemble neural nets by Theorem+Futile · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That makes sense. Rare errors will be screened out if instead of a single deterministic selection process you use a distribution of schemes and select based on the most probable outcome... I am wondering what our brain does with its minority reports...

    --
    .oO0(?)
  20. Average across models by biodata · · Score: 5, Informative

    Neural networks are only one way to build machine learning classifiers. Everything we've learnt about machine learning tells us not to rely on a single method/methodology and that we will consistently get better results by taking the consensus of multiple methods. We just need to make sure that a majority of the other methods we use have different blind spots to the ones the neural networks have.

    --
    Korma: Good
    1. Re:Average across models by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      This is true, however the current craziness about deep-learning NN is due to the fact that they are incredibly effective at some computer vision tasks, including very difficult ones, that were thought almost impossible until recently. They beat other classifiers by a large margin. However not long ago SVM were the rage, etc. No doubt in a few years we will have exported the good feature of deep-learning to other methodologies.

    2. Re:Average across models by slew · · Score: 1

      OR, perhaps we use the same method but look at the data a different way (e.g., like a turbo code uses the same basic error correction code technology, but permutes the input data)... I suspect the brain does something similar to this, but I have no evidence...

    3. Re:Average across models by neiras · · Score: 1

      It seems that a mechanism to determine the "trustworthiness" of each method and thus weighting its individual influence in the vote would make sense. That way the system would weed out the models that produce incorrect results.

      Then we feed the system a steady diet of Fox News and watch it downvote the lonely "liberal" model.

      Man, this stuff makes me want to go back to school. Highly interesting.

  21. The brain doens't classify pixel based. by Rashdot · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Apparently these neural nets are taught to classify "images", instead of breaking these images down into recognizable forms and properties first.

    --
    This is not the sig you're looking for.
    1. Re:The brain doens't classify pixel based. by cyberhooligan77 · · Score: 1

      Or, classify patterns. Have you ever seen some weird paitings or drawings where images of one thing, are mixed with images of another thing ?

    2. Re:The brain doens't classify pixel based. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Apparently these neural nets are taught to classify "images", instead of breaking these images down into recognizable forms and properties first.

      And how exactly should a computer do that? It can't "break down" anything. All it has to work with are the color values of individual pixel. It actually has to examine/transform/calculate those pixels across the image and build up to your recognizable forms and properties

    3. Re:The brain doens't classify pixel based. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Your brain recieves a series of light intensities at different points similar (though not quite the same) as pixel data. The first thing it does is to then extract useful features from this data, but this feature extraction is done within the brain. This is actually quite similar to how the early layers of a deep neural net will perform feature extraction which is processed further on in the network.

    4. Re:The brain doens't classify pixel based. by ceoyoyo · · Score: 1

      Deep networks automatically learn to recognize image elements. That's one of their most interesting features.

    5. Re:The brain doens't classify pixel based. by TheLink · · Score: 1

      Even so they could be doing it at the wrong level or wrong way.

      When humans are awake we are continuously trying to simulate and predict the world (including ourselves). We often recognize stuff by generating many similar things to match with. If one of those similar things matches enough then we think it's likely to be that thing. When we look at a dog, our internal world simulator creates a model of that dog. Then we see the dog.

      So a dog that really looks like a dog will never look like a cat to a normal human just because the pixels are tweaked slightly. The "internal dog" that's seen is generated by the human. It may look like a weird cat to someone who has seen cats but has never seen dogs, and that person may say "hey that's a strange looking cat".

      That's also why we often need a lot more "CPU" when dealing with unfamiliar stuff.

      Lastly I'm no AI researcher or neuroscientist. I'm just making shit up ;).

      --
    6. Re:The brain doens't classify pixel based. by Rashdot · · Score: 1

      Yes, but the behavior reported in TFA tells me that the matching is probably done too early in the network. That, or the classification process is not as good as a biological one.

      --
      This is not the sig you're looking for.
    7. Re:The brain doens't classify pixel based. by ceoyoyo · · Score: 1

      That's pretty much the way deep networks work. You show them a bunch of things and they generate internal representations of them. Cats and dogs are spontaneously divided into different representations, which can then be translated into class labels.

      From the description in the article, it sounds like what's happening here is that the researchers have purposely designed test cases that confuse the network. It's less likely to happen with common things in people because we have much more thorough training - before you can reliably recognize cats you've seen a LOT of them, from all angles. Also, your eyes are constantly shifting their viewpoint a bit so that they get jittered images. They might be able to reduce this problem a lot by training the network on variations of the same images randomly shifted by a pixel or two.

      It's also not particularly hard to come up with images that confuse the human brain.

  22. The brain has multiple neural nets by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Indeed, remembering the experiments done in the 1960s by Sperry and Gazzaniga on patients who had a divided corpus callosum, there are clearly multiple systems that can argue with each other about recognising objects. Maybe part of what makes us really good at it, is not relying on one model of the world, but many overlaid views of the same data by different mechanisms.

  23. The Curve by JimSadler · · Score: 1

    When we ride a bicycle the brain constantly adjusts for error. We try to travel in a straight line but it really is a series of small curves as we adjust and keep trying to track straight. Processes such as vision probably do the same thing. As we quickly try to identify items it probably turns into a "this not that" series until the brain eventually decides we have gotten it right. Obviously this all occurs constantly and at rather high, internal, speeds.

  24. Biologically inspired but that's it by Missing.Matter · · Score: 0

    If a deep neural network is biologically inspired we can ask the question, does the same result apply to biological networks?

    No. Artificial neural networks are inspired by biology, but that's where the similarity ends. Any conclusion drawn from an ANN should not be cast onto their biological counterparts.

    1. Re:Biologically inspired but that's it by ceoyoyo · · Score: 1

      That's not really true. ANNs, particularly deep ones, share a lot of features with specific parts of the brain, especially primary sensory processing areas. It's quite reasonable to ask whether emergent properties of deep AANs are also found in the analogous systems in the brain (and vice versa). Some, such as visual processing done by simple, then complex cells, are already known. An ANN isn't a simulation of any part of the brain, but it's an analogous system that does share some properties and might well share others.

  25. Nonsense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I worked with neural networks, there are many types. You can get robust classification. Good example is face recognition software. So this seems to be an attempt to disqualify the safety of self driving cars by taking a special case failure scenario.

    1. Re:Nonsense by biodata · · Score: 1

      I guess you are trolling right? Even Facebook's facial recognition is consistently worse than a human's and a human's is significantly worse than perfect. If by robust you mean "frequently correct, and but wrong sometimes", then OK, but then that is what OP was saying about neural nets.

      --
      Korma: Good
    2. Re:Nonsense by dave420 · · Score: 1

      You are absolutely right if by "consistently worse" you mean "consistently better", and by "significantly worse than perfect" you mean "97.53% accurate".

    3. Re:Nonsense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "97.53% accurate"

      Accurate at what?

      I think the problem is that people are mixing things up here. A human might be that accurate at looking at two photos and saying they are the same subject, but they're pretty shit at looking at a photo and comparing it to their memory.

    4. Re:Nonsense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That depends. Make it a picture of someones mother and I think they'd recognise it an awful lot. Make it a picture of someone they briefly saw 20 years ago and they wont. And if its not something out brains have developed to recognise as important (eg a face) then that makes it increasingly unlikely.

    5. Re:Nonsense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So how does it do straight on to profile? Or is it just in the bounds that facebook set?

  26. Or the other way around by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    To be clear, the adversarial examples looked to a human like the original, but the network misclassified them.

    That's one way to see things. The other is to consider that the human brain is flawed and is incapable of making the distinction between the two images, and the deep neural network can.

  27. Re:The Flaw Lurking Deep in Slashdot Beta by doti · · Score: 4, Informative

    SoylentNews is the replacement for /.

    reddit is of another kind.

    --
    factor 966971: 966971
  28. Re:Errors, and then there are cringeworthies... by ThatsDrDangerToYou · · Score: 2

    Like when you are walking behind a guy with long hair and think she might be kinda hot. Doh!

  29. Errors, what do we do by byteherder · · Score: 1

    We know there will be errors with the neural nets. There will be edge cases (like the one described with the cat), corner cases, bizarre combination of inputs that result in misclassifications, wrong answers and bad results. This happens in the real world too. People misclassify things, get things wrong, screw up answers.

    The lesson is not to trust the computer to be infallible. We have trusted the computer to do math perfectly. 1 + 1 = 2, always, but is not so for neural nets. It is one thing if the neural net will not tag the photo of your cat on Facebook even if there are 100 other pictures of your cat on your account. It is another if your photo get misidentified as being a terrorist on the "kill on sight" list.

    The question is what do we do with the errors?

    1. Re:Errors, what do we do by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We have trusted the computer to do math perfectly.

      Its none ideal to have a single computational route and unit on safety critical systems.

    2. Re:Errors, what do we do by byteherder · · Score: 1

      We have trusted the computer to do math perfectly.

      Its none ideal to have a single computational route and unit on safety critical systems.

      I agree, the space shuttle had backup and redundancy for all the safety critical systems.
      'We have trusted the computer to do math perfectly.' and then along can the Pentium Bug.

  30. AI question I heard 30yrs ago... by TapeCutter · · Score: 4, Funny

    "Sure it's possible that computers may one day be as smart as humans, but who wants a computer that remembers the words to the Flintstones jingle and forgets to pay the rent?"

    --
    And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    1. Re:AI question I heard 30yrs ago... by rikkitikki · · Score: 1

      That sounds like the second half of a Pinky and the Brain AYPWIP:

      Brain: Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?
      Pinky: I think so Brain, but who wants a computer that remembers the words to the Flintstones jingle and forgets to pay the rent?

    2. Re:AI question I heard 30yrs ago... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      could also be the second half of a Radio Eriwan joke
      Q: Is it true that soviet scientists developed a computer that's as intelligent as a human?"
      A: "In principle yes. But who wants a computer that remembers but forgets the teachings of Lenin?"

  31. pac learning model by sevenfactorial · · Score: 2

    The Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) learning model is what formally justifies the tendency of neural networks to "learn" from data (see Wikipedia).

        While the PAC model does not depend on the probability distribution which generates training and test data, it does assume that they are *the same*. So by "adversarially" choosing test data, the researchers are breaking this important assumption. Therefore it is in some ways not surprising that neural networks have this vulnerability. It shouldn't be an issue in real life, assuming that the training data and the testing data really do come from the same probability distribution.

    That said, this shows why you wouldn't want to use neural networks for, say, cryptography.

    1. Re:pac learning model by ceoyoyo · · Score: 1

      The evil "left as an exercise for the reader" part of textbooks where the author shows you a bunch of examples then gives you a problem that's related to those, but just enough different in some small way that it's fiendishly difficult. Or, more generally, the trick question.

  32. Re: The Flaw Lurking Deep in Slashdot Beta by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No

  33. Errors? by Script+Cat · · Score: 1

    "does the same result apply to biological networks?"
    Of course we just rely on other parts of our brain and use logic to throw these out. I once saw an old carpet rolled up on the side of the road and OMG it looked like a rhino. But I knew this was not a rhino.

    1. Re:Errors? by RJFerret · · Score: 2

      News from the future, rhinos find success adapting to suburban environments with discarded carpet camouflage, people slow to adapt.

  34. Cogntitve bias by sackbut · · Score: 2

    This seems to be almost a form of cognitive bias as defined and studied by Tversky and Kahneman. I direct you to : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.... Or as previously pointed out optical illusions seem to be an equivalence.

  35. Are they the same thing? by Capt.Albatross · · Score: 2

    While I share your view that expecting the mind to be explained as a single neural network (in the Comp. Sci. sense) is probably simplistic, I don't think modeling it as multiple neural nets and a voter fixes the problem. I am not quite sure about this, but isn't a collection of neural nets and a voter equivalent to a single neural net? Or, to put it a slightly different way, for any model that consists of multiple neural nets and a voter, there is a single neural net that is functionally identical? I am assuming the voter is there to pick the most common classification by the component networks.

  36. What's the incentive, and should we worry? by spiritplumber · · Score: 1

    I wonder how much it pays to the first person who sorts this one out? I wonder if this is happening to the human brain?

    --
    Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
  37. Natural selection elminated that flaw... by Squidlips · · Score: 1

    a long time ago..... If, say, the reef fish cannot distinguish a coral head from a barracuda, then it get eliminated pretty quick. There must be a flaw in the artificial neural nets.

    1. Re:Natural selection elminated that flaw... by ceoyoyo · · Score: 1

      Yeah right. Brains make mistakes all the time, but natural selection has tuned them to err on the side of paranoia.

  38. Training by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Can't you just use these adversarial examples to train the network?

    Sounds like a good feedback loop, train, find counter examples, train more, find counter examples train, you would probably get diminishing returns but the network would hopefully converge on better solutions?

  39. Re:The Flaw Lurking Deep in Slashdot Beta by Peyton · · Score: 1

    It's going to cost Slashdot their user base as more people refuse to put up with this nonsense. Dice is ruining its own investment.

    You can't polish a turd.

    of course you can. and then you have a shiny turd.

  40. Minksy said this in 1969 by peter303 · · Score: 3, Informative

    NN technology is 60 years old. Some A.I. pundts disliked in the beginning such as Minsky in his 1969 book Perceptrons. Many of these flaws have been LONG known.

  41. Not trying to mimic the brain. by sanchom · · Score: 1

    > how is it so different from the neural networks that are trying to mimic it? These neural networks are not trying to mimic the brain.

    1. Re:Not trying to mimic the brain. by harvestsun · · Score: 1

      b-but they both have "neural" in the name! and I read about it in Popular Science!

  42. Amazing by Stumbles · · Score: 1

    A blind spot in something designed by man.

    --
    My karma is not a Chameleon.
  43. Re:The Flaw Lurking Deep in Slashdot Beta by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Reddit's slowly turning into tumblr. At this rate, I'm going to start going outside again.

  44. The Napoleon Dynamite Problem by Jodka · · Score: 2

    The sounds similar to the Napoleon Dynamite Problem, the problem encountered in the Netflix Prize challenge of predicting user ratings for some particular films. For most films knowledge of an individuals preferences for some films were good predictors for their preferences of other films. Yet preferences for some particular films were hard to predict, notably the eponymous Napoleon Dynamite.

    Neural network identification and automated prediction of individual film ratings are both classification tasks. Example sets for both of these problems contain particular difficult-to-classify examples. So perhaps this phenomena of "adversarial examples" described in the Szegedy et. al. article is more generally a property of datasets and classification, not an artifact of implementing classification using neural networks.

    --
    Ceci n'est pas une signature.
  45. What a synopsis by JonathanHart · · Score: 1

    Lets take a look at what's being said here. A neural network that "learns" has been found to occasionally make mistakes, and perhaps not perform as well as humans. So... There's room for more improvement and research. The example in the synopsis about an autonomous car mistaking a pedestrian as clear road is feasible regardless of whether a neural net is used, simply due to sensor errors. Or maybe the pedestrian is wearing a mascot uniform. The recognition of objects as what they are is an extremely difficult computational problem, and will likely be riff with errors and inaccuracies for many years as R and D contains. Think of it this way. If you were driving your car at night and someone through a Real Doll in the road are you going to be able to distinguish it as human or not? Probably not. You will likely identify it as an obstacle and react anyway, which is all we'd need an autonomous car to do. Id be wary of programming much human recognition into an autonomous car because of the problem of incorrectly identifying non humans as humans. Otherwise you'd get headlines like "Car thieves using Nicolas Cage cardboard cut outs to steal cars." Which would be hilarious, but inconvenient. They'd have it on youtube, with the car saying something like "Hello sir, could you please clear the roadway." In a voice like the Iron Man Jarvis, and the thieves would have programmed a sound board so the cutout could respond with quotes from the SNL weekend update "In the Cage" segment. "That's high praise!"

  46. It is not "A" neural network in the classical sens by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Team,

    The human brain is not "A" neural network, but an ensemble of them. It works more like a random forest. Random forest-robustness is the textbook solution to a problem like this - that of improving the robustness of a single learner using ensemble methods.

    Rgds,
    EngrStudent

  47. Sounds like a real world example of Gödel's by jcochran · · Score: 3, Interesting

    incompleteness theorem. And as some earlier posters' stated, the correction is simple. Simply look again. The 2nd image collected will be different from the previous and if the NN is correct, will resolve to the correct interpretation.

  48. Lifelike by ememisya · · Score: 1

    AI modelled on us will only prove how flawed we really are.

  49. Optical Illusion by gurps_npc · · Score: 2

    Is the term we use for errors in human neural networks. If you do a google search for optical illusions you will find many examples. From pictures that look like they are 3d, but are just 2d, to sizes that appear to change but aren't, we make lots of errors. Not to mention the many many cases where we think "THAT'S A FACE", whether it is jesus on toast, a face on the moon, or just some trees on a mountainside, we are hardwired to assume things are faces.

    --
    excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
  50. Not misclassified by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It just didn't match the classification from the neural nets in our heads.

  51. Pedestrian by PPH · · Score: 1

    I think the example of mis-classifying pedestrians as clear road is over-reaching a bit to find a problem.

    On the other hand, the AI might end up in trouble when deciding to run over cats and avoid dogs.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
    1. Re:Pedestrian by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      so let's not overreach, we don't want a dog misidentified as a person when there is choice to hit a tree, or hit a person or hit a dog. the solution is clearly to run over the beast.

  52. Uncanny valley? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... interesting, failed the captcha the first time I posted this ...

    1. Re:Uncanny valley? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So yes the human brain has similar built-in errors ...

  53. Idea by gman003 · · Score: 1

    Would it be possible to build a neural net that recognizes when one of these blind spots has been hit? If it's reliably misidentified across neural nets as they claim, there should be enough common attributes for a different neural net to train on.

  54. Inspired by != identical to by mbone · · Score: 1

    This reminds me of the problems with perceptrons (a early, linear, neural net), which caused AI scientists to loose interest in them, until neural nets came along.

  55. Millions of dollars spent, The Great Discovery? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Compression is lossy. Wow! Who'da thunkit?

  56. This is not entirely true by ziggystarsky · · Score: 2
    We (humans) can classify stills of cats pretty well, no? So your argument does not hold.

    It's true that there is more information in video data, but the problem described in the article is certainly not caused by the restriction to stills.

  57. Re:The Flaw Lurking Deep in Slashdot Beta by lister+king+of+smeg · · Score: 1

    Then go to reddit, you fucking whiner.

    You mean jump from the toilet to the cesspit?
    Why not just keep slashdot nice get rid of beta, quit posting sports stories to a geek news site and maybe actually fix things like unicode support, ssl (as in keep the cert up to date for the login at least), rather than bone the sites UI into a Yet.Another.Identical.Agragrator.

    --
    ---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
  58. Re:The Flaw Lurking Deep in Slashdot Beta by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I saw that Mythbusters!

  59. Does the human brain have similar built-in errors? by mice7943 · · Score: 1

    Yes, we call that Deja vu.

  60. Bad Training by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The training input set needs to jitter and fizz in its least significant bits.

    What do you expect? You take a N.Net don't feed it fuzzy enough logic and don't give it redundant enough connectivity, then you magnify the misclassification via repeated application of the "Deep Learning" bullshit (which is another way of saying: Separate N.Nets with the input selection of the next depending on the classification of the first). What do you know? It's shit. Now, I want you to perform the test again with color quantinization and down-sampling which destroys those "slight differences". Who the hell is paying these morons at Google?

  61. Re:The Flaw Lurking Deep in Slashdot Beta by lister+king+of+smeg · · Score: 1

    Then go to reddit, you fucking whiner.

    You mean jump from the toilet to the cesspit?
    Why not just keep slashdot nice get rid of beta, quit posting sports stories [slashdot.org] to a geek news site and maybe actually fix things like unicode support, ssl (as in keep the cert up to date for the login at least), rather than bone the sites UI into a Yet.Another.Identical.Agragrator.

    --
    ---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
  62. Re:The Flaw Lurking Deep in Slashdot Beta by lister+king+of+smeg · · Score: 1

    opps double posted probably due to the shity wifi timing me out for the last half hour

    --
    ---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
  63. Frightening by FithisUX · · Score: 1

    I wonder about all these papers claiming fantastic performance with neural nets. This paper makes me wonder about the perturbation invariance of neural networks. The question is how much perturbation is tolerated? Yes, one can perturb a cat image but how much perturbation leaves the concept of cat invariant is another question. This is a fundamental symmetry. In any case this paper is very big news. Maybe the inherent problem is that neural networks do not approximate smooth, rather than measurable/continuous functions.

  64. Incompleteness by dsdtzero · · Score: 1

    If you believe mathematics lives outside the human brain do not read on....

    "Logic" is an extension of our neural wiring. The logical statements that would be created by another being that lives, say, in a highly viscous medium or who lives on very short or very long timescales compared to humans would be almost incomprehensible to us. There would be overlaps because we share the same universe but if our understanding of nature through our development of physics has taught us anything we know our view of nature is heavily dependent upon our observation platform. Quantum "weirdness" is a fine example of the impedance mismatch between our brains which have evolved to make babies, avoid rocks etc, and the atomic scale. (Though mathematics is not physics, the mathematics that sticks around in the minds of many is that which serves some purpose in our understanding of the physical universe so its hard to separate the two.)

    The observation in the article hints toward an interesting notion. Intrinsic categorization challenges embedded within networks may have something to tell us about the limits of our ability to categorize nature to some practical purpose. Thanks for the post.

  65. Selection Bias by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The training input set needs to jitter and fizz in its least significant bits.

    What do you expect? You take a N.Net don't feed it fuzzy enough logic and don't give it redundant enough connectivity, then you magnify the misclassification via repeated application of the "Deep Learning" bullshit (which is another way of saying: Separate N.Nets with the input selection of the next depending on the classification of the first). What do you know? It's shit. Now, I want you to perform the test again with color quantinization and down-sampling which destroys those "slight differences". Who the hell is paying these morons at Google?

    Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. Add some entropy to the input set over time, and average the output classification over time. No more "blind spots".


    Is it a... Car?
    I think it's a car, has two headlights.
    Hmm, it could be two motorcycles coming at me, instead.
    Oh, wait! Yep it's totally a Car!
    Still a car.
    That's a car there, buddy.
    Same car.
    Yawn. Hey that car is moving. I can tell because I've been staring at it for 10 whole milliseconds.

    Google's exhibiting some MIGHTY selection bias. They're tweaking the input just slightly a WHOLE BUNCH and damn near all the time it's a correct classification... But when they fight that one misclassification, they're picking that ONE sample (in bold) out of the set and saying: HEY LOOK! What fools. It's not like the one incorrect output is uniformly thereafter misclassified by all neural networks. Also, down-sampling and quantizing kernels do exist, as you've mentioned.

    Aim a webcam at the picture to give it a bit of (quantum) entropy instead, and take more than one sample over time. You know, like brains do? To note: Uniformly, all of their neural networks which correctly classified the image gave the correct response the vast majority of the time. It was only in a very minor edge case where some modification of input caused the classification to fail. Solution is simple: Input entropy and perform an average.

  66. It needs an incentive to not screw up by Tablizer · · Score: 2

    What AI really needs is a wife that nags it if it f8cks up.

    Humans seem pretty subject to close-call-foul-ups too. When proof-reading my own writing, often I don't spot a problem because my mind translates the pattern as I intended, not as I wrote it. For example, if I meant to write "Finding the Right Person for the Job..." but instead wrote it as "Finding the Right Pearson for the Job..." (note the "a"), there's a fairly high chance I'd miss it because the pattern of what I meant clogs my objectivity, even after multiple readings.

    And I have come close to hitting pedestrians who wore clothing resembling the colors of the street at night. (Please don't wear dark clothes at night, people. It's hard to see with window glare etc.)

  67. overfitting anyone ?? by giampy · · Score: 1

    I bet this is a case of overftting. The network is too "large" (at least in some dimensions) with respect to the data that it is required to approximate/classify.

    --
    We learn from history that we learn nothing from history - Tom Veneziano
  68. Your eye moves over a still by presidenteloco · · Score: 3, Informative

    When analyzing a still picture/scene, your eye moves its high resolution central area of its camera around the low level visual features of the image. Thus the image is processed over time as many different images.
    The images in that time sequence occur at slightly different locations of the visual light-sensor array (visual field) and at slightly different angles and each image has considerably different pixel resolution trained on each part of the scene.

    So that would still almost certainly give some robustness against these artifacts (unlucky particular images) being able to fool the system.

    Time and motion are essential in disambiguating 3D/4D world with 2D imaging.

    Also, I would guess that having learning algorithms that preferentially try to encode a wide diversity of different kinds of low level features would also protect against being able to be fooled, even by a single image, but particularly over a sequence of similar but not identical images of the same subject.

    --

    Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
  69. Rustling bush tiger perception by presidenteloco · · Score: 1

    not so good for your hunting buddies.

    (or bed partner for that matter.)

    Don't shoot til you see the golds of their eyes.

    --

    Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
  70. Add noise to fix by SpinyNorman · · Score: 1

    If the misclassification only occurs on rare inputs then any random perturbation of that input is highly likely to be classified correctly.

    The fix therefore (likely what occurs in the brain) is to add noise and average the results. Any misclassified nearby input will be swamped by the greater number of correctly classified ones.

  71. automobile drivers can't see *cyclists by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's not just a vision problem, but most motorcyclists or bicyclists have stories about the time(s) a car uplled out right in front of them with the driver looking 'right at them'. Car drivers can also fail to see big trucks in their side-view mirrors.
    I'm old enough to have been involved in both, before the advent of cell phones.
    I think our brains are conditioned to look for car-sized objects.

  72. The Flaw Lurking In Every Deep Neural Net by danielpauldavis · · Score: 0

    "Put more bluntly, 'Does the human brain have similar built-in errors?'" Hoo boy, yes. After working in education a couple of decades, this 1 fact I've seen in almost every student and in many of the teachers, as well (most of us know how to hide this glitch, but not always.)

    --
    Cranky educator.
    1. Re:The Flaw Lurking In Every Deep Neural Net by stoatwblr · · Score: 1

      If a neural net did this, it woudl still probably screw up less often than humans do.

      There are a number of examples of security forces killing an innocent on the basis of misidentification and of course the most glaring example of the other way around involved the World Trade Centre and a couple of 767s.

  73. of course the true art by presidenteloco · · Score: 1

    is perfectly ambiguous sarcasm/non-sarcasm, for which a tag is really needed.

    --

    Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
  74. The Flaw Lurking In Every Deep Neural Net by gantry · · Score: 1

    No need to wait for self-driving cars. If the NSA is using neural networks to analyse big data and look for terrorists, it will sometimes miss obvious terrorists, and sometimes classify harmless people as terrorists. I would hope that the latter would be screened out by human review, but there's not much we can do about the former without improving our understanding of neural nets.

  75. Too near an edge by Animats · · Score: 1

    This is a fascinating result. The previous assumption was that neural nets generated stable "generalizations", or settled into a state where the correctly classified cases were not near the "edge" of a transition to a different result. That appears to be incorrect. The training process apparently settles near edges, making it vulnerable to small differences. As the author points out, in high-dimensional spaces, most of the volume is near edges.

    This probably isn't an overfitting problem. The researchers say they sized their nets appropriately. (If you make an oversized neural net, one big enough to hold all the cases in its state, and train it, you just get a lookup table. There's no generalization. Same problem as curve-fitting with a curve with as many parameters as data points.)

    Neural nets are such a black box. Theory of what's going on in there is currently unsatisfactory. The more statistics-based forms of machine learning are on firmer theoretical ground.

  76. applicability? by darnkitten · · Score: 1

    So, are they saying that if a car is dusty or has too many rust spots, that it won't be recognized as a car? ...or that you could escape a pursuing driverless cop car with flying chaff?

    Somehow, I can't imagine that we would risk ourselves in a car without robust and redundant identification systems.

  77. Re:The Flaw Lurking Deep in Slashdot Beta by B33rNinj4 · · Score: 1

    Still better than Digg.

  78. Obvious, once stated by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    A neural net only attempts to model a part of the brain function.

    It encodes the minimum set of differences necessary to distinguish to input vectors it has been trained to handle.
        This doesn't say it will make the right choice for other vectors.

    Kind of like a human's muscle memory. IE, the memory you use when there isn't time to think.
          This works great for things you have done before, but provides unexpected results for new stuff.
                Maybe when we think before we act, we get to run other what-if test vectors on the net and eliminate the less fortunate results.
                      Which says wisdom might be just having more situations committed to muscle memory?

    A similar story for weather models.
          They seem to work best on things they have seen before.

    Probably economic models as well?

  79. Re:Errors, and then there are cringeworthies... by DickBreath · · Score: 1

    The assumption of hotness would instantly disappear upon discovering her true gender.

    --

    I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
  80. just neural nets by iggymanz · · Score: 1

    plenty of business and common web software have had bugs causing crashes with certain legitimate combinations of input values.

    this is not a scary announcement

  81. Bad summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    One of those cases where it's quicker and more informative to fetch the paper and read the abstract than to read the article... or the all-too-gushing slashvertising "summary".

  82. Think I found it: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dempster%E2%80%93Shafer_theory

    also check out
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter

  83. Re:The Flaw Lurking Deep in Slashdot Beta by Lotana · · Score: 1

    SoylentNews needs to get more of the community before entrenched Slashdot members migrate there.

    It is a chicken-egg problem and it hasn't reached the breaking point.

  84. Irritating that they did not push the limits by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They present a method for generating nearly identical samples that will be misclassified. I want to know what happens if they loop through this a few million times, training the neural net with all of these variations. My guess is that the network's overall classifying ability would decrease to uselessness after allowing the process to run long enough.

  85. Sensitivity was known, generating adversaries new by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I performed some sensitivity analyses of neural networks for M.A. Styblinski in 1987. We took the approach of breaking neural networks by making small changes to the solution strengths. In some cases it took surprisingly little tweaking, we weren't even covering new ground when we did this. It was enough for us to decide not to use neural networks for our application of trying to make SPICE smarter.

  86. Brain Games by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Nat'l Geographic has a television series on various ways the human brain often makes incorrect assumptions based on patterns as the premise of the show.

  87. Re:The Flaw Lurking Deep in Slashdot Beta by sillybilly · · Score: 1

    It's a divide and conquer strategy, send the crowd to various other places, not a single one. This slashdot crowd has too much influence in the world that other people, like media moguls, have to pay hard cash for, and it's free here.

  88. Self-driving cars-what could go wrong? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I don't want to be anywhere near them.

  89. Minksy said this in 1969 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Minsky didn't say anything even close to this. The "neural networks" in Perceptrons concerned a class of shallow linear networks (really not much different from linear regression with a hard-threshold nonlinearity at the top node). The neural networks analyzed in the paper are very different and are capable of approximating a much more rich class of functions. Neural nets are doing some pretty neat things these days now that we have really fast computers / huge amounts of labeled information.

  90. Race Conditions by Plocmstart · · Score: 1

    Reminds me of debugging errors related to digital logic race conditions. When you are on the edge of meeting timing, a slight shift in the wrong direction can cause the result to be incorrect, sometimes with an order of randomness. Until you violate that timing you have the feeling of security since everything is going smoothly. I'm sure there's a more mathematical way to explain this, but similarly I think much more testing could be done to understand what variables effect the outcome. It would be interesting to see more details, such as how many pixels must be modified for a failure? To what magnitude do the pixels have to be changed by? Is there a tradeoff between # of pixels and magnitude of change per pixel? Are certain pixels more important than others (edge detection for example)?

    1. Re:Race Conditions by stoatwblr · · Score: 1

      "Reminds me of debugging errors related to digital logic race conditions."

      There's only one way to win a logic race condition - eliminate it.

  91. How shocking is that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Here it is rather that minor, unnoticable, alterations of RGB components makes *any* net to be fooled.

    That is you have net trained to detect white dogs, and for any correctly recognized image, there exists many, many, minor alternations that fools the net. The news is that these minor, unnoticable, alternations exists for all nets. AFAIU training to avoid the errors, will cause the mischaracterized images to change to slightly different ones.

  92. Google autodrive transportation pods by FreedomFirstThenPeac · · Score: 1

    I reserve the term "cars" for manually operated conveyances. I wonder if they get around the blind spot by an ensemble model across the time-component. As in, "the last 30 times that looked like a bicyclist, now it's a flower? I think (and act) not."

    --
    "There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
  93. How was it misclasiffied? by stoatwblr · · Score: 1

    Was a human misclassified as a cat? or vice versa?

    For a self-driving car, it's not so much of a problem if a pedestrian is misclassified as some other kind of hazard, as long as it reacts the same way when the hazard gets in the way.

  94. Oops! Big OOPS. Do they have the math? Sounds like by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Sounds like general assertion. Brains are NN too but in such a BIGGER scale, you cannot just run _computable_ simulations and pretend you can extend results to real brains (composition fallacy). Input space may be such that a particular network can completely and fully classify it (in finite time)... so they have to prove the relationship between NN processing per se and input spaces. Particularly, an important NN can implement (represent) ad hoc classification algorithms... etc.

  95. For NEAT variation also? by MonsterMasher · · Score: 1

    .
    The Nero-evolutionary approach (NEAT & HYPER-NEAT) should be significantly less vulnerable for networks trained to any standard related to 'sample size'. If you use very slightly different inputs in smaller and smaller differences.
    .
    Also, may retrain itself - to some degree.
    .
    Down side for flexability is possibly significantly larger integrated network, and more CPU time running variations 'on-the-fly'. (What? Your computer too bogged down with your web-browser, and just keep getting cheaper?)
    .

  96. Machine Learning Neural Networks vs. the brain by amoreperfectvacuum · · Score: 1

    Having just completed a Coursera course on machine learning I must be an expert, but the neural networks described there were essentially just a large matrix of parameters. One propogated the data forward through the matrix and made a prediction of the class of the object, then propogated the errors backward and corrected the parameters of the matrix accordingly. This method basically draws a lot of small line segments around each class, so indeed, it will always be possible to place individual points near a class boundary, but on the wrong side. The description of a neural network in the olfactory bulb which I read about years ago worked completely differently. The excitatory and inhibitory neurons acting on one another produced a quasi-periodic signal. This was basically described as noise, but the amplitude of the signal over the olfactory bulb encoded a signal. So the odor of wood chips produced a particular pattern of amplitude over the olfactory bulb that was different than that for any other odor. If the animal was shocked when exposed to the odor of wood chips, then the pattern of amplitude changed, so an association between different stimuli was already being made at the lowest level. I can't quite tell, but it doesn't seem that a simple matrix will be a good model for this.

  97. Errors in Human Brains? Of course! by servant · · Score: 1

    Neural networks are just a model/guess of how real neurons work together. I am guessing that 'natural brains' do have errors, and more error correcting and redundant systems than are in current computerized systems. If we recognize items one way, we probably (my guess) recognize the same item several ways (and get it wrong a few times). Even then, humans (and other animals) mis-recognize items and others regularly. They also re-analyse data, and use other senses (and even averaging over time with slightly different perceptions) to have better long term recognition results. Could all that be done with artificial neural networks? Sure. But we just aren't there yet, but neither are our biological systems. :-)

    --
    ... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."