A Brief Introduction to Adversarial Examples

Over the past few years, adversarial examples have received a significant amount of attention in the deep learning community. In this blog post, we want to share our high-level perspective on this phenomenon and how it fits into a larger question of robustness in machine learning. In subsequent posts, we plan to delve deeper into the topics that we will only briefly touch on today. To set the stage for our discussion, let us briefly introduce adversarial examples. On the left, we have an image of a pig that is correctly classified as such by a state-of-the-art convolutional neural network. After perturbing the image slightly (every pixel is in the range [0, 1] and changed by at most 0.005), the network now returns class "airliner" with high confidence.