Poster
Adversarially trained neural representations are already as robust as biological neural representations
Chong Guo · Michael Lee · Guillaume Leclerc · Joel Dapello · Yug Rao · Aleksander Madry · James DiCarlo
Hall E #502
Keywords: [ APP: Neuroscience, Cognitive Science ] [ DL: Robustness ]
Visual systems of primates are the gold standard of robust perception. There is thus a general belief that mimicking the neural representations that underlie those systems will yield artificial visual systems that are adversarially robust. In this work,we develop a method for performing adversarial visual attacks directly on primate brain activity. We then leverage this method to demonstrate that the above-mentioned belief might not be well-founded. Specifically, we report that the biological neurons that make up visual systems of primates exhibit susceptibility to adversarial perturbations that is comparable in magnitude to existing (robustly trained) artificial neural networks.