Deep learning is closing the gap with humans on several object recognition benchmarks. Here we investigate this gap in the context of challenging images where objects are seen from unusual viewpoints. We find that humans excel at recognizing objects in unusual poses, in contrast with state-of-the-art pretrained networks (EfficientNet, SWAG, ViT, SWIN, BEiT, ConvNext) which are systematically brittle in this condition. Remarkably, as we limit image exposure time, human performance degrades to the level of deep networks, suggesting that additional mental processes (requiring additional time) take place when humans identify objects in unusual poses. Finally, our analysis of error patterns of humans vs. networks reveals that even time-limited humans are dissimilar to feed-forward deep networks. We conclude that more work is needed to bring computer vision systems to the level of robustness of the human visual system. Understanding the nature of the mental processes taking place during extra viewing time may be key to attain such robustness.

It's no secret that machine-learning models tuned and tweaked to near-perfect performance in the lab often fail in real settings. This is typically put down to a mismatch between the data the AI was trained and tested on and the data it encounters in the world, a problem known as data shift. For example, an AI trained to spot signs of disease in high-quality medical images will struggle with blurry or cropped images captured by a cheap camera in a busy clinic. Now a group of 40 researchers across seven different teams at Google have identified another major cause for the common failure of machine-learning models. Called "underspecification," it could be an even bigger problem than data shift.