A New Kind of Adversarial Example: Measuring the Human-Model Gap, and Its Relationship to OOD Detection

Abstract

Almost all adversarial attacks add an imperceptible perturbation to fool a model. We instead study the opposite: a large, clearly visible perturbation that causes the model to keep its original, correct prediction, even though a human would no longer recognize the image. Prior work showed such examples can be generated at scale but left three questions untested: whether humans really perform worse than the model, whether standard out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and calibration tools catch it, and whether existing defenses mitigate it. We answer all three on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet. (i) An independent recognizer proxy drops to ~49% on CIFAR-10 while the model stays at 100% -- a gap a small human pilot (N=5) corroborates directly and that is not explained by signal loss (a matched-magnitude Gaussian control degrades recognizability faster); a CLIP zero-shot proxy confirms the gap at ImageNet scale too. (ii) Confidence- and energy-based OOD detectors and calibration are structurally blind (0% detection, ECE ~= 0), while a feature-space Mahalanobis detector flags 100% -- but is evaded by an adaptive attacker at no cost to success. (iii) No classical defense, including adversarial training (45% robust accuracy), reduces attack success (correlation with large-epsilon_l resistance r ~= 0). A mechanistic analysis further shows the attack destroys low-level texture far faster than edge/shape structure.