Papers › MNIST-C: A Robustness Benchmark for Computer Vision

MNIST-C: A Robustness Benchmark for Computer Vision

5 Jun 2019arXiv:1906.02337archive 2025-07-28

Norman Mu, Justin Gilmer

We introduce the MNIST-C dataset, a comprehensive suite of 15 corruptions applied to the MNIST test set, for benchmarking out-of-distribution robustness in computer vision. Through several experiments and visualizations we demonstrate that our corruptions significantly degrade performance of state-of-the-art computer vision models while preserving the semantic content of the test images. In contrast to the popular notion of adversarial robustness, our model-agnostic corruptions do not seek worst-case performance but are instead designed to be broad and diverse, capturing multiple failure modes of modern models. In fact, we find that several previously published adversarial defenses significantly degrade robustness as measured by MNIST-C. We hope that our benchmark serves as a useful tool for future work in designing systems that are able to learn robust feature representations that capture the underlying semantics of the input.

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disk testingautomated-usi/fashion-mnist-c/mnist_c.py community (archive-listed) ran MIT (permissive) · 07a9b58ec8d910eb · report
flip_sides testingautomated-usi/fashion-mnist-c/additional_corruptions.py community (archive-listed) ran fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 3f1558360c090b44 · report
flip_up_down testingautomated-usi/fashion-mnist-c/additional_corruptions.py community (archive-listed) ran fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 01cd0fbb90369028 · report
turn_left testingautomated-usi/fashion-mnist-c/additional_corruptions.py community (archive-listed) ran fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 20f8669ba3834517 · report
generate_mix_dataset testingautomated-usi/fashion-mnist-c/generator.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 712d7aea3437c370 · report
line_from_points testingautomated-usi/fashion-mnist-c/mnist_c.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 9f67f6434ab46c83 · report
plasma_fractal identical code first harvested elsewhere unverified licence of this copy not recorded · 3fe212e00cbe6fb3 · report

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Adversarial RobustnessBenchmarking

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MNIST-C

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