{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/intriguing-generalization-and-simplicity-of","title":"The shape and simplicity biases of adversarially robust ImageNet-trained CNNs","arxiv_id":"2006.09373","date":"2020-06-16","proceeding":null,"authors":["Peijie Chen","Chirag Agarwal","Anh Nguyen"],"abstract":"Increasingly more similarities between human vision and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been revealed in the past few years. Yet, vanilla CNNs often fall short in generalizing to adversarial or out-of-distribution (OOD) examples which humans demonstrate superior performance. Adversarial training is a leading learning algorithm for improving the robustness of CNNs on adversarial and OOD data; however, little is known about the properties, specifically the shape bias and internal features learned inside adversarially-robust CNNs. In this paper, we perform a thorough, systematic study to understand the shape bias and some internal mechanisms that enable the generalizability of AlexNet, GoogLeNet, and ResNet-50 models trained via adversarial training. We find that while standard ImageNet classifiers have a strong texture bias, their R counterparts rely heavily on shapes. Remarkably, adversarial training induces three simplicity biases into hidden neurons in the process of \"robustifying\" CNNs. That is, each convolutional neuron in R networks often changes to detecting (1) pixel-wise smoother patterns, i.e., a mechanism that blocks high-frequency noise from passing through the network; (2) more lower-level features i.e. textures and colors (instead of objects);and (3) fewer types of inputs. Our findings reveal the interesting mechanisms that made networks more adversarially robust and also explain some recent findings e.g., why R networks benefit from a much larger capacity (Xie et al. 2020) and can act as a strong image prior in image synthesis (Santurkar et al. 2019).","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.09373v6","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.09373v6.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"intriguing-generalization-and-simplicity-of","repo_url":"https://github.com/anguyen8/shape-bias","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-generation","task_name":"Image Generation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"1x1-convolution","method_name":"1x1 Convolution"},{"method_slug":"auxiliary-classifier","method_name":"Auxiliary Classifier"},{"method_slug":"average-pooling","method_name":"Average Pooling"},{"method_slug":"batch-normalization","method_name":"Batch Normalization"},{"method_slug":"bottleneck-residual-block","method_name":"Bottleneck Residual Block"},{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"global-average-pooling","method_name":"Global Average Pooling"},{"method_slug":"googlenet","method_name":"GoogLeNet"},{"method_slug":"grouped-convolution","method_name":"Grouped Convolution"},{"method_slug":"inception-module","method_name":"Inception Module"},{"method_slug":"kaiming-initialization","method_name":"Kaiming Initialization"},{"method_slug":"local-response-normalization","method_name":"Local Response Normalization"},{"method_slug":"max-pooling","method_name":"Max Pooling"},{"method_slug":"relu","method_name":"ReLU"},{"method_slug":"residual-block","method_name":"Residual Block"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2006.09373","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2006.09373"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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