LW - Ironing Out the Squiggles by Zack M Davis

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Ironing Out the Squiggles, published by Zack M Davis on April 29, 2024 on LessWrong.
Adversarial Examples: A Problem
The apparent successes of the deep learning revolution conceal a dark underbelly. It may seem that we now know how to get computers to (say) check whether a photo is of a bird, but this façade of seemingly good performance is belied by the existence of adversarial examples - specially prepared data that looks ordinary to humans, but is seen radically differently by machine learning models.
The differentiable nature of neural networks, which make them possible to be trained at all, are also responsible for their downfall at the hands of an adversary. Deep learning models are fit using stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to approximate the function between expected inputs and outputs.
Given an input, an expected output, and a loss function (which measures "how bad" it is for the actual output to differ from the expected output), we can calculate the gradient of the loss on the input - the derivative with respect to every parameter in our neural network - which tells us which direction to adjust the parameters in order to make the loss go down, to make the approximation better.[1]
But gradients are a double-edged sword: the same properties that make it easy to calculate how to adjust a model to make it better at classifying an image, also make it easy to calculate how to adjust an image to make the model classify it incorrectly. If we take the gradient of the loss with respect to the pixels of the image (rather than the parameters of the model), that tells us which direction to adjust the pixels to make the loss go down - or up.
(The direction of steepest increase is just the opposite of the direction of steepest decrease.) A tiny step in that direction in imagespace perturbs the pixels of an image just so - making this one the tiniest bit darker, that one the tiniest bit lighter - in a way that humans don't even notice, but which completely breaks an image classifier sensitive to that direction in the conjunction of many pixel-dimensions, making it report utmost confidence in nonsense classifications.
Some might ask: why does it matter if our image classifier fails on examples that have been mathematically constructed to fool it? If it works for the images one would naturally encounter, isn't that good enough?
One might mundanely reply that gracefully handling untrusted inputs is a desideratum for many real-world applications, but a more forward-thinking reply might instead emphasize what adversarial examples imply about our lack of understanding of the systems we're building, separately from whether we pragmatically expect to face an adversary.
It's a problem if we think we've trained our machines to recognize birds, but they've actually learned to recognize a squiggly alien set in imagespace that includes a lot of obvious non-birds and excludes a lot of obvious birds. To plan good outcomes, we need to understand what's going on, and "The loss happens to increase in this direction" is at best only the start of a real explanation.
One obvious first guess as to what's going on is that the models are overfitting. Gradient descent isn't exactly a sophisticated algorithm. There's an intuition that the first solution that you happen to find by climbing down the loss landscape is likely to have idiosyncratic quirks on any inputs it wasn't trained for.
(And that an AI designer from a more competent civilization would use a principled understanding of vision to come up with something much better than what we get by shoveling compute into SGD.) Similarly, a hastily cobbled-together conventional computer program that passed a test suite is going to have bugs in areas not covered by the tests.
But that explanation is in tension with other evidence, like the observati...