In plain words: Tiny image changes fool networks when the loss changes steeply with the pixels. That steepness grows with the square root of image size regardless of network design, and the weakness survives both normal and robust training, though stronger regularization softens it.
Abstract · First-order Adversarial Vulnerability of Neural Networks and Input Dimension
Over the past few years, neural networks were proven vulnerable to adversarial images: targeted but imperceptible image perturbations lead to drastically different predictions. We show that adversarial vulnerability increases with the gradients of the training objective when viewed as a function of the inputs. Surprisingly, vulnerability does not depend on network topology: for many standard network architectures, we prove that at initialization, the $\ell_1$-norm of these gradients grows as the square root of the input dimension, leaving the networks increasingly vulnerable with growing image size. We empirically show that this dimension dependence persists after either usual or robust training, but gets attenuated with higher regularization.
Carl-Johann Simon-Gabriel, Yann Ollivier, Léon Bottou, Bernhard Schölkopf, David Lopez-Paz
arXiv:1802.01421 · stat.ML, cs.CV, cs.LG · submitted Feb 5, 2018 · updated Jun 16, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · Paper previously called: "Adversarial Vulnerability of Neural Networks Increases with Input Dimension". 9 pages main text and references, 11 pages appendix, 14 figures