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Researchers Create 'Psychedelic' Stickers That Confuse AI Image Recognition (techcrunch.com)

"Researchers at Google were able to create little stickers with 'psychedelic'-looking patterns on them that could trick computer AI image-classifying algorithms into mis-classifying images of objects that it would normally be able to recognize," writes amxcoder: The patterned stickers work by tricking the image recognition algorithm into focusing on, and studying, the little pattern on the small sticker -- and ignoring the rest of the image, including the actual object in the picture... The images on the stickers were created by the researchers using knowledge of features and shapes, patterns, and colors that the image recognition algorithms look for and focus on.

These stickers were created so that the algorithm finds them 'more interesting' than the rest of the image and will focus most of it's attention on analyzing the pattern, while giving the rest of the image content a lower importance, thus ignoring it or confusing it.

The technique "works in the real world, and can be disguised as an innocuous sticker," note the researchers -- describing them as "targeted adversarial image patches."

22 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. Detail vs shape by QuietLagoon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It looks as if the AI is concentrating on the area with the most detail, even though it is not really relevant. I've seen similar, ummmm, distractions confuse AI. For example, disguising a stop sign so that a self-driving car is confused.

    1. Re:Detail vs shape by religionofpeas · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Humans have similar problems. Instead of stop sign, they sometimes concentrate on areas with the most detail, like a smartphone.

    2. Re:Detail vs shape by ColdWetDog · · Score: 2

      Look! A squirrel!

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    3. Re: Detail vs shape by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Informative

      AI image recognition systems will recognize what, and only what, they have been trained to recognize. If you train a system with a million pictures of dogs, and a million pictures of cats, it can learn to tell a cat from a dog. But if you then give it a picture of a goat, it will not classify it correctly, because that isn't what it was trained to do.

      Similarly, current image recognition systems are not (yet) designed to resist the intentional spoofing described in TFA. In the future, they will become more robust. An obvious way to do this is to use a GAN, with one NN generating spoofs, while another NN learns to resist them.

  2. Oh no! by fluffernutter · · Score: 2

    Oh no! Our spying may be tampered with!

    --
    Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
  3. By this time next year ... by Big+Bipper · · Score: 2

    Amazon will be selling hats and scarves with psychedelic looking patterns on them.

    --
    You live and learn, or you don't learn much.
    1. Re:By this time next year ... by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 2

      Amazon will be selling hats and scarves with psychedelic looking patterns on them.

      The 60's are back, baby!

      --
      #DeleteChrome
  4. Re:Dick Van Dyke by NEDHead · · Score: 2

    Perhaps he left to attend his brother's funeral?

  5. let's get that on clothing by iggymanz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Remember the "worlds ugliest t-shirt" in one of William Gibson's novels? All cameras in that book's world were compelled by their firmware to fill image of the wearer of that suit with background. One could laugh at such a notion except ....scanners won't do banknotes

    1. Re:let's get that on clothing by iggymanz · · Score: 2

      should be doable, e-ink on cloth came out 7 years ago

  6. Re:Retrain. by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 2

    1. Add random stickers to images.
    2. Need to retrain network constantly.
    3. Network useless.

    --
    #DeleteFacebook
  7. I thought what I'd do was I'd pretend... by AtomicSymphonic · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "I thought what I'd do was I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes"

    Reminds me of Ghost in the Shell's Laughing Man calling card... His sticker would appear over people's faces in VR if they were infected.

    1. Re:I thought what I'd do was I'd pretend... by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 2

      As I recall, his sticker/logo only appeared over his own face.

      --
      #DeleteChrome
  8. ALPR? by Ralgha · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Would one of these stickers on the bumper of my car defeat the automated license plate readers?

    1. Re:ALPR? by Jeremi · · Score: 2

      If you glue enough of them over the license numbers/letters, definitely.

      --


      I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
    2. Re:ALPR? by Dog-Cow · · Score: 2

      Huh? Ever drive on a modern toll road? Those cameras send data to a system that mails you a bill. No humans involved.

  9. Computer Chess by bussdriver · · Score: 2, Interesting

    With a similar enough network or access to the targeted network, simply create a network that learns to fool the other one. Loosely like two computers playing chess but more like a spam generator to defeat filters.

    Adversarial network learning... just not an official use of it... The solution is to add this kind of learning to the network... except it won't be fool proof until the network is quite good; since the adversary could have as many variations of attack as the classifier has in recognition.

    If you created the adversarial network used to train it, you could leave INTENTIONAL holes for future exploitation. Even going so far as to purposely train in holes if you had that kind of access. It's not like anybody is going to spot your code in the AI -- only the training setup... which could be long gone after years of training... In the future, I would expect to have VALUE in AI training whereby the cost of "reboot" would be quite significant... finding bad training data over millions of samples and years of experience could be difficult and who's to say all that would be retained? You take the resulting network from last week and retrain from that point-- you'd not go back years ago and restart. I'm talking way out... because AI is so simple now you can just archive all input data... maybe by that point we can still archive it all and learning hardware will be faster... anyhow, it makes for interesting Sci-Fi possibilities even if it may never become an issue (even if it doesn't, there would still be a cost involved in retraining from scratch.)

  10. Actual Intelligence by DCFusor · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Is not as easily fooled as this pattern matching NN grossly incorrectly hyped as Artificial intelligence. Just saying - hype is hype no matter how much you want to believe you've got the next big thing and innovation (and in this case, NN research and pattern matching work go WAY back).

    --
    Why guess when you can know? Measure!
    1. Re:Actual Intelligence by DCFusor · · Score: 2
      1. Incomplete training sets - no NN can "expect the unexpected". 2. NN's alone are just pattern matchers - there is no underlying understanding. A picture of a truck is a truck. A real intelligence would perhaps notice the edges of the painting...crappy analogy, but hopefully it communicates. 3. Knowing when you don't know - some types of NN can have confidence estimates, key word, estimate. But still, a blue truck against a blue sky in an intersection in the desert where there's almost no intersections, almost always blue sky and rarely trucks across the road? Give me a break. Don't tell me what "researchers will do" unless you can get a lot more specific about just how they're going to do that - and whether they are actually researching anything worthwhile at all, or just throwing mountains of data at mountains of CPU and hoping. I could go on, but if you don't already get it...no point.
      .

      This is not purely a case of just improving the basic tech or the basic inputs, though that's part of it. A NN is a hammer that makes the whole world your thumb. More is needed - NN's will always be good for data reduction, but only as a layer of what's needed to have anything like "real" artificial intelligence on which lives can depend.
      .

      Yeah, this is at least partly my lawn, I'm not speaking from inexperience.

      --
      Why guess when you can know? Measure!
  11. Re:Bright shiny objects by sinij · · Score: 4, Informative

    Humans do suffer from similar problem, however we have compensatory mechanisms to correct visual errors.

    Ever glanced at something, seen something weird and had to do a double-take? This is exactly what happened to you. Quick neural nets misidentified something and you had to do full image processing to clear the confusion up.

    The reason Humans know to do a double-take is because we have many other neural nets sitting on top of image identification nets. So when our image identification malfunctions, other nets red-flag it and do error-correction. Sometimes it takes long time to process. Sometimes we decide it is just safer to get the hello out of there (e.g. seeing ghosts).

  12. Re:Bright shiny objects by Tony+Isaac · · Score: 2

    Setting aside your needless insult, why DO we tend to be attracted to shiny objects? Perhaps it's because at some level, our brains think it might be something important, or dangerous? Our brains have been trained to notice things that might be important to our survival and safety. Anything that is unusual or unexpected might be some sort of threat, leading us to be distracted unnecessarily.

  13. Re:Bright shiny objects by Hognoxious · · Score: 2

    Our brains have been trained to notice things that might have been important to our survival and safety in the world how it was thousands of years ago.

    FTFY

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."