SCOOTER: A Human Evaluation Framework for Unrestricted Adversarial Examples

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Fazlija, Dren, Zühlke, Monty-Maximilian, Schrader, Johanna, Orlov, Arkadij, Stein, Clara, Olatunji, Iyiola E., Kudenko, Daniel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Fazlija, Dren
Zühlke, Monty-Maximilian
Schrader, Johanna
Orlov, Arkadij
Stein, Clara
Olatunji, Iyiola E.
Kudenko, Daniel
author_facet Fazlija, Dren
Zühlke, Monty-Maximilian
Schrader, Johanna
Orlov, Arkadij
Stein, Clara
Olatunji, Iyiola E.
Kudenko, Daniel
contents Unrestricted adversarial attacks aim to fool computer vision models without being constrained by $\ell_p$-norm bounds to remain imperceptible to humans, for example, by changing an object's color. This allows attackers to circumvent traditional, norm-bounded defense strategies such as adversarial training or certified defense strategies. However, due to their unrestricted nature, there are also no guarantees of norm-based imperceptibility, necessitating human evaluations to verify just how authentic these adversarial examples look. While some related work assesses this vital quality of adversarial attacks, none provide statistically significant insights. This issue necessitates a unified framework that supports and streamlines such an assessment for evaluating and comparing unrestricted attacks. To close this gap, we introduce SCOOTER - an open-source, statistically powered framework for evaluating unrestricted adversarial examples. Our contributions are: $(i)$ best-practice guidelines for crowd-study power, compensation, and Likert equivalence bounds to measure imperceptibility; $(ii)$ the first large-scale human vs. model comparison across 346 human participants showing that three color-space attacks and three diffusion-based attacks fail to produce imperceptible images. Furthermore, we found that GPT-4o can serve as a preliminary test for imperceptibility, but it only consistently detects adversarial examples for four out of six tested attacks; $(iii)$ open-source software tools, including a browser-based task template to collect annotations and analysis scripts in Python and R; $(iv)$ an ImageNet-derived benchmark dataset containing 3K real images, 7K adversarial examples, and over 34K human ratings. Our findings demonstrate that automated vision systems do not align with human perception, reinforcing the need for a ground-truth SCOOTER benchmark.
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SCOOTER: A Human Evaluation Framework for Unrestricted Adversarial Examples
Fazlija, Dren
Zühlke, Monty-Maximilian
Schrader, Johanna
Orlov, Arkadij
Stein, Clara
Olatunji, Iyiola E.
Kudenko, Daniel
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Unrestricted adversarial attacks aim to fool computer vision models without being constrained by $\ell_p$-norm bounds to remain imperceptible to humans, for example, by changing an object's color. This allows attackers to circumvent traditional, norm-bounded defense strategies such as adversarial training or certified defense strategies. However, due to their unrestricted nature, there are also no guarantees of norm-based imperceptibility, necessitating human evaluations to verify just how authentic these adversarial examples look. While some related work assesses this vital quality of adversarial attacks, none provide statistically significant insights. This issue necessitates a unified framework that supports and streamlines such an assessment for evaluating and comparing unrestricted attacks. To close this gap, we introduce SCOOTER - an open-source, statistically powered framework for evaluating unrestricted adversarial examples. Our contributions are: $(i)$ best-practice guidelines for crowd-study power, compensation, and Likert equivalence bounds to measure imperceptibility; $(ii)$ the first large-scale human vs. model comparison across 346 human participants showing that three color-space attacks and three diffusion-based attacks fail to produce imperceptible images. Furthermore, we found that GPT-4o can serve as a preliminary test for imperceptibility, but it only consistently detects adversarial examples for four out of six tested attacks; $(iii)$ open-source software tools, including a browser-based task template to collect annotations and analysis scripts in Python and R; $(iv)$ an ImageNet-derived benchmark dataset containing 3K real images, 7K adversarial examples, and over 34K human ratings. Our findings demonstrate that automated vision systems do not align with human perception, reinforcing the need for a ground-truth SCOOTER benchmark.
title SCOOTER: A Human Evaluation Framework for Unrestricted Adversarial Examples
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07776