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In a perfect world, what you see is what you get. If this were the case, the job of artificial intelligence systems would be refreshingly straightforward.
Take collision avoidance systems in self-driving cars. If visual input to on-board cameras could be trusted entirely, an AI system could directly map that input to an appropriate action -- steer right, steer left, or continue straight -- to avoid hitting a pedestrian that its cameras see in the road.
But what if there's a glitch in the cameras that slightly shifts an image by a few pixels? If the car blindly trusted so-called "adversarial inputs," it might take unnecessary and potentially dangerous action.