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Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu

71–80 of 122 posts

Re: Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

#71
My biggest pet peeve with this work is that they incorrectly say:

> These adversarial examples have been recognized since 2014 (here's one of the first papers on the topic).

Adversarial machine leaning has been around since 2006. It's only since 2014 that people decided to call them Adversarial Examples.

Re: Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a human's neural network can correctly correlate the before/after examples, so can a computer's. color _me_ skeptical, but this is like saying we have functioning AGI; that artificial NNs are the same as the ones we have in our skulls. This to me, is an effect of the over-anthropomorphization of machine learning. It's a bad intuition to have. However, I do agree. This is just one step in an arms race, and one it…

That bit was more of a forward-looking statement about the future capabilities of image recognition, but yes it is somewhat hyperbolic in the general case. I don't believe we'll ever achieve AGI, but I do believe we'll have super reliable application-specific classifiers that vastly outperform humans and won't be fooled by tricks like this.

Machine vision will likely be one of the last of these, though; the visual cortex is a pretty large chunk of very sophisticated hardware.

Re: Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

#73
post #8

Color me extremely skeptical. A low-pass filter will make short work of any "tiny, pixel-level" changes designed to thwart ML. After all, one of the most tell-tale identifiers (space between eyes/nose/mouth) is still plainly observable and unaltered in the "cloaked" image. If a human's neural network can correctly correlate the before/after examples, so can a computer's. They might have found an issue with some moder…

Or more simply, what if you just take a real life photo of the image and scan it back in and use the same classification techniques?

This can be thwarted fairly easily https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.02533.pdf

Re: Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

#74
post #8

Color me extremely skeptical. A low-pass filter will make short work of any "tiny, pixel-level" changes designed to thwart ML. After all, one of the most tell-tale identifiers (space between eyes/nose/mouth) is still plainly observable and unaltered in the "cloaked" image. If a human's neural network can correctly correlate the before/after examples, so can a computer's. They might have found an issue with some moder…

Applying some form of transformation is a weak countermeasure to adversarial examples. Especially simple ones such as low pass filters.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.07397.pdf

Neural Networks do not learn what humans learn. They can learn completely different and sometimes much smaller features.

Re: Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

#75

What we really need is Fawkes face paint. A little makeup/lotion that you apply to the face. It would apply random cloaking directly to your skin. This way the cloaking is automatic and applies to images that are not under your control. I can be as careful as I want to be with my own media. That doesn't stop my wife from uploading the family photo to Facebook or a public camera capturing my image.

> What we really need is Fawkes face paint.

Check out https://cvdazzle.com (archive link, because honestly I'm surprised the site is still up: http://archive.is/v39xI)

Re: Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

#76

This might work today, but it won’t work tomorrow. This is just one side of a GAN, on the next iteration, it will be defeated. Bottom line is that if a human can recognize, then it is possible for a machine as well. Also, given that the big networks can just keep throwing more resources at it (I.e. GPT-3), it’s just a matter of increasing the network size to improve feature redundancy.

Actually the system breaking tomorrow isn't likely to be the case due to the transferability property of adversarial examples.

Adversarial examples transfer between different models trained on different datasets with different architectures.

A new model from yesterday's data is essentially the same architecture, just with some fluctuations in decision boundaries.

Might it affect the success over time? Sure. But not tomorrow.

Re: Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

#77
post #36

An easier option: don't post photos on Facebook and Twitter. And discourage your friends and family from doing so.

The second part of that conjunction--discouraging your family and friends from using FB or Twitter--is definitely not easy.

In fact, it's basically the entire problem.

Re: Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

#78
post #8

Color me extremely skeptical. A low-pass filter will make short work of any "tiny, pixel-level" changes designed to thwart ML. After all, one of the most tell-tale identifiers (space between eyes/nose/mouth) is still plainly observable and unaltered in the "cloaked" image. If a human's neural network can correctly correlate the before/after examples, so can a computer's. They might have found an issue with some moder…

From the linked article:

Q: Can't you just apply some filter, or compression, or blurring algorithm, or add some noise to the image to destroy image cloaks?

A: As counterintuitive as this may be, the high level answer is no simple tools work to destroy the perturbation that form image cloaks. To make sense of this, it helps to first understand that Fawkes does not use high-intensity pixels, or rely on bright patterns to distort the classification value of the image in the feature space. It is a precisely computed combination of a number of pixels that do not easily stand out, that produce the distortion in the feature space. If you're interested in seeing some details, we encourage you to take a look at the technical paper (also linked above). In it we present detailed experimental results showing how robust Fawkes is to things like image compression and distortion/noise injection. The quick takeaway is that as you increase the magnitude of these noisy disruptions to the image, protection of image cloaking does fall, but slower than normal image classification accuracy. Translated: Yes, it is possible to add noise and distortions at a high enough level to distort image cloaks. But such distortions will hurt normal classification far more and faster. By the time a distortion is large enough to break cloaking, it has already broken normal image classification and made the image useless for facial recognition.

Re: Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

#79
Stuff like this usually falls in the "too good to be true" category, and it seems like several people in this thread have already defeated Fawkes. I remember a few years ago, a Google paper claimed to have figured out a way to categorize aesthetically pleasing photos from unaesthetic ones. My friend had an idea for an app that could sort -- even roughly -- "bad" pictures from "good" pictures, as she takes like thousands of photos when on vacation. Just out of curiosity, I actually went through the trouble of setting up and running their TensorFlow implementation to pretty mediocre results.

Re: Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

#80
post #69

From a fundamental information theory perspective, if there is still enough information in the image such that we can identify the person, but we cannot identify any delta between 'cloaked' & 'uncloaked' images, then we are just talking about some arbitrary amount of noise that can effectively be ignored. If a fixed number of bytes can be interpreted visually by a human as a specific human on a reliable basis, there…

Your analysis has the error that you are comparing something that can recognize a face from among a few thousand (a human) with something that is designed to recognize a face from among many millions (a facial recognition algorithm).

Also, they addressed low pass filters and other image degradation techniques in the article, and almost every adversarial example paper addresses them, and works in spite of them. You're not the first person to think of that.

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