  Deep neural networks (DNNs) are known to have a fundamental sensitivity to
adversarial attacks, perturbations of the input that are imperceptible to
humans yet powerful enough to change the visual decision of a model.
Adversarial attacks have long been considered the "Achilles' heel" of deep
learning, which may eventually force a shift in modeling paradigms.
Nevertheless, the formidable capabilities of modern large-scale DNNs have
somewhat eclipsed these early concerns. Do adversarial attacks continue to pose
a threat to DNNs?
  Here, we investigate how the robustness of DNNs to adversarial attacks has
evolved as their accuracy on ImageNet has continued to improve. We measure
adversarial robustness in two different ways: First, we measure the smallest
adversarial attack needed to cause a model to change its object categorization
decision. Second, we measure how aligned successful attacks are with the
features that humans find diagnostic for object recognition. We find that
adversarial attacks are inducing bigger and more easily detectable changes to
image pixels as DNNs grow better on ImageNet, but these attacks are also
becoming less aligned with features that humans find diagnostic for
recognition. To better understand the source of this trade-off, we turn to the
neural harmonizer, a DNN training routine that encourages models to leverage
the same features as humans to solve tasks. Harmonized DNNs achieve the best of
both worlds and experience attacks that are detectable and affect features that
humans find diagnostic for recognition, meaning that attacks on these models
are more likely to be rendered ineffective by inducing similar effects on human
perception. Our findings suggest that the sensitivity of DNNs to adversarial
attacks can be mitigated by DNN scale, data scale, and training routines that
align models with biological intelligence.
