A new way to train AI systems could keep them safer from hackers

The context: One of the greatest unsolved flaws of deep learning is its vulnerability to so-called adversarial attacks. When added to the input of an AI system, these perturbations, seemingly random or undetectable to the human eye, can make things go completely awry. Stickers strategically placed on a stop sign, for example, can trick a self-driving car into seeing a speed limit sign for 45 miles per hour, while stickers on a road can confuse a Tesla into veering into the wrong lane. Safety critical: Most adversarial research focuses on image recognition systems, but deep-learning-based image reconstruction systems are vulnerable too. This is particularly troubling in health care, where the latter are often used to reconstruct medical images like CT or MRI scans from x-ray data.