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Comment by Immortal333 | Hacker News Reader

This is tested on existing models/Face Recognition API which means locked pre-trained models. So, They might have learned way to add pixels such that model outputs very different embedding. This is know issue in deep learning [0][1][2].

I believe, Model trained on cloaked images would defeat its purpose and make this technique useless.

[0] Su, Jiawei, Danilo Vasconcellos Vargas, and Kouichi Sakurai. "One pixel attack for fooling deep neural networks." IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation 23.5 (2019): 828-841.

[1] Guo, Chuan, et al. "Countering adversarial images using input transformations." arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.00117 (2017).

[2] Liu, Yanpei, et al. "Delving into transferable adversarial examples and black-box attacks." arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.02770 (2016).

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This should be somewhat mitigated if you keep using different cloaking images, no?

But the model will eventually be updated to detect and process the new cloaking images. So, to stay ahead, you decide to create a model that automatically generates different cloaking images, and... The whole system is now just a GAN : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

I think there's a (hopefully strongly privacy preserving) combinatorial explosion here though. If current models can be trained to accurately-enough recognise me with, say, 100 training images - this tool might produce unique enough perturbations to require 100 images for each of the possible perturbations, potentially requiring you to train your new model using tens of thousands or millions of cloaked versions of the 100 images for each of the targets in your training set.

(If I were these researchers I'd totally be reaching out to AWS/Azure/GCE for additional research funding... <smirk>)

Not necessarily, because the changes are destructive. They can't restore what was there before, and they can't necessarily infer which image was cloaked and which was not.

There is a problem there that your pics are already out and you can no longer update them....

If you use a new cloaking image for each picture you upload to social then they will all be embedded in a different location for a given feature extractor and an adversary wouldn’t be able to reverse search for linked pictures—that’s at least my understanding of how the method would need to be used. But if you keep using the same cloaking image, your adversary could definitely learn that process and effectively undo it.

Cool. So it would prevent someone from learning my face from a collection of photos on my profile. That makes more sense...

The FAQ there addresses that, suggesting you can "dilute down" the ratio of normal-to-cloaked images in the public data sets the model creators train on, and hence reduce their future accuracy.

(So now you just need to somehow get as many cloaked photos of yourself uploaded and tagged to FB as they've collected in the last decade or so...)

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