Image classifiers can not be made robust to small perturbations

Abstract

The sensitivity of image classifiers to small perturbations in the input is often viewed as a defect of their construction. We demonstrate that this sensitivity is a fundamental property of classifiers. For any arbitrary classifier over the set of n-by-n images, we show that for all but one class it is possible to change the classification of all but a tiny fraction of the images in that class with a perturbation of size O(n^1/(p,1)) when measured in any p-norm for p 0. We then discuss how this phenomenon relates to human visual perception and the potential implications for the design considerations of computer vision systems.

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