HyperAIHyperAI

Command Palette

Search for a command to run...

ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness

Robert Geirhos Claudio Michaelis Felix A. Wichmann* Patricia Rubisch Matthias Bethge* Wieland Brendel*

Abstract

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are commonly thought to recognise objects by learning increasingly complex representations of object shapes. Some recent studies suggest a more important role of image textures. We here put these conflicting hypotheses to a quantitative test by evaluating CNNs and human observers on images with a texture-shape cue conflict. We show that ImageNet-trained CNNs are strongly biased towards recognising textures rather than shapes, which is in stark contrast to human behavioural evidence and reveals fundamentally different classification strategies. We then demonstrate that the same standard architecture (ResNet-50) that learns a texture-based representation on ImageNet is able to learn a shape-based representation instead when trained on "Stylized-ImageNet", a stylized version of ImageNet. This provides a much better fit for human behavioural performance in our well-controlled psychophysical lab setting (nine experiments totalling 48,560 psychophysical trials across 97 observers) and comes with a number of unexpected emergent benefits such as improved object detection performance and previously unseen robustness towards a wide range of image distortions, highlighting advantages of a shape-based representation.


Build AI with AI

From idea to launch — accelerate your AI development with free AI co-coding, out-of-the-box environment and best price of GPUs.

AI Co-coding
Ready-to-use GPUs
Best Pricing

HyperAI Newsletters

Subscribe to our latest updates
We will deliver the latest updates of the week to your inbox at nine o'clock every Monday morning
Powered by MailChimp