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Intriguing properties of neural networks (arxiv.org)
1 point by bra-ket on Jan 22, 2015 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Probing image- and speech-recognition networks, the study found random mixes of a layer's neurons explain its knowledge as well as single neurons do. It also showed imperceptible tweaks to an image can flip the answer, and the same tweak fools a separately trained network.

Abstract

Deep neural networks are highly expressive models that have recently achieved state of the art performance on speech and visual recognition tasks. While their expressiveness is the reason they succeed, it also causes them to learn uninterpretable solutions that could have counter-intuitive properties. In this paper we report two such properties. First, we find that there is no distinction between individual high level units and random linear combinations of high level units, according to various methods of unit analysis. It suggests that it is the space, rather than the individual units, that contains of the semantic information in the high layers of neural networks. Second, we find that deep neural networks learn input-output mappings that are fairly discontinuous to a significant extend. We can cause the network to misclassify an image by applying a certain imperceptible perturbation, which is found by maximizing the network's prediction error. In addition, the specific nature of these perturbations is not a random artifact of learning: the same perturbation can cause a different network, that was trained on a different subset of the dataset, to misclassify the same input.

Christian Szegedy, Wojciech Zaremba, Ilya Sutskever, Joan Bruna, Dumitru Erhan, Ian Goodfellow, Rob Fergus
arXiv:1312.6199 · cs.CV, cs.LG, cs.NE · submitted Dec 21, 2013 · updated Feb 19, 2014
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Also discussed: Jan 2019 (2 points, 0 comments) · Feb 2015 (19 points, 4 comments)