  It has been suggested that adversarial examples cause deep learning models to
make incorrect predictions with high confidence. In this work, we take the
opposite stance: an overly confident model is more likely to be vulnerable to
adversarial examples. This work is one of the most proactive approaches taken
to date, as we link robustness with non-calibrated model confidence on noisy
images, providing a data-augmentation-free path forward. The adversarial
examples phenomenon is most easily explained by the trend of increasing
non-regularized model capacity, while the diversity and number of samples in
common datasets has remained flat. Test accuracy has incorrectly been
associated with true generalization performance, ignoring that training and
test splits are often extremely similar in terms of the overall representation
space. The transferability property of adversarial examples was previously used
as evidence against overfitting arguments, a perceived random effect, but
overfitting is not always random.
