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Yet humans are totally unphased by these modifications. What makes humans still excel at these edge cases?

wolfgke 9y ago
> What makes humans still excel at these edge cases? It is rather that we built the signs in a way such that they are very robust for the human visual system to detect.
taneq 9y ago
I was pondering on this topic earlier today and came to the conclusion, "because our performance is judged only by humans." Imagine if an alien visited Earth, and was completely dumbfounded by our sketches and cartoon drawings. "But it looks nothing like a chicken", they say, looking at a sketch of a chicken and a photo of a chicken. "It's just an edge case that happens to trigger your 'chicken' neuron."
acomjean 9y ago
Our brains are pretty good at image processing. Plus we have an inherent understanding the world, including the way objects rotate and change shape. We're looking for the stop sign (big red hexegon). Though I've seen a new stop sign added recently, and the number of cars that don't see it is remarkable. I'm not an expert on AI though ( a few classed at university and I specialized in something else). Its the general classifiers that give us trouble. We want to show it 100s of stop sign pictures and have it figure out when we show it new one. But we're not asking it, is this a stop sign, we're asking "what is this". We can write software that probably is good at finding hexagons and colors and thus stop signs. Take facial recognition, its remarkably good at this point, but its doing one thing ( though I've seen a computer id 3 people in a photo with 2 in it , because a third person's photo was in the background.)
- userbinator 9y ago
  We're looking for the stop sign (big red hexegon). Though I've seen a new stop sign added recently, and the number of cars that don't see it is remarkable. These two sentences together show that our brains aren't just looking for the signs; we're also looking at many other aspects of the situation and even taking into account past experience (e.g. is this an intersection? Have I seen a stop sign here before? If I'm new to this area, I'm likely going to be far more alert to the signage.) If someone planted a (non-modified) stop sign on the side of a highway, where the road is completely straight and with no intersection, I bet some drivers won't even see it, those who do will be puzzled, and approximately none of them will even try to stop.
asadjb 9y ago
A more comprehensive world model. And the ability to realise that we may be interpreting an external stimulus incorrectly, and acting cautiously when that happens.
Someone 9y ago
Possibly that we aren't trained on different training sets. In particular, I think most machine learning training sets have way too many positives. For example, for every second you see a traffic sign, there likely are a hundred or more where we don't see one (especially in our youth) Also, the claim that humans excel at this can be called anthropocentrism. You could also point at the features those machine learning algorithms use and say "why don't humans see these very prominent features?"
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
visarga 9y ago
Humans have weird edge cases as well. There are hundreds of visual "illusions".
ioquatix 9y ago
I'll give a counterpoint based on my own experience. When I travelled to the US, from New Zealand, to interview with a certain large company, I actually managed to mis-read road signs, in particular traffic lights, on a number of occasions, much to my alarm. I am not a bad driver - and there were a number of factors - perhaps being tired from the trip, so, it isn't clear cut. But, I remember feeling like the traffic lights just didn't look like traffic lights - the intersections just felt off - so off, that I actually failed to recognise them in some instances. It was actually a bit upsetting at the time, I've never quite experienced anything like it, but I think it's possible that the human system can fail to work if the input is sufficiently different from what is "typical".
- taneq 9y ago
  To be fair, this was in Christchurch not too long after one of the bigger earthquakes but I got severely messed around by the ambiguity of some of the road signs, to the point where I once ended up on the wrong side of the road.
stordoff 9y ago
We designed the signs to fit the human vision system, and the modifications target a different vision system. I imagine there will be similar edge cases that fool human vision.
- pishpash 9y ago
  Not even very clever edge cases, but consider that birds see more of the spectrum than humans, there are designs that are visible to birds but invisible to humans. There, we just found examples that are adversarially designed to blind humans but are so obvious to a bird: it wasn't that hard!
IanCal 9y ago
These edge cases are designed specifically knowing the structure of (or at least being able to run large numbers of experiments on) the system in question. We can't do that with humans. So we don't know what similar situations we could create if we did.

> What makes humans still excel at these edge cases? It is rather that we built the signs in a way such that they are very robust for the human visual system to detect.

taneq 9y ago

I was pondering on this topic earlier today and came to the conclusion, "because our performance is judged only by humans." Imagine if an alien visited Earth, and was completely dumbfounded by our sketches and cartoon drawings. "But it looks nothing like a chicken", they say, looking at a sketch of a chicken and a photo of a chicken. "It's just an edge case that happens to trigger your 'chicken' neuron."

acomjean 9y ago

Our brains are pretty good at image processing. Plus we have an inherent understanding the world, including the way objects rotate and change shape. We're looking for the stop sign (big red hexegon). Though I've seen a new stop sign added recently, and the number of cars that don't see it is remarkable. I'm not an expert on AI though ( a few classed at university and I specialized in something else). Its the general classifiers that give us trouble. We want to show it 100s of stop sign pictures and have it figure out when we show it new one. But we're not asking it, is this a stop sign, we're asking "what is this". We can write software that probably is good at finding hexagons and colors and thus stop signs. Take facial recognition, its remarkably good at this point, but its doing one thing ( though I've seen a computer id 3 people in a photo with 2 in it , because a third person's photo was in the background.)

userbinator 9y ago
We're looking for the stop sign (big red hexegon). Though I've seen a new stop sign added recently, and the number of cars that don't see it is remarkable. These two sentences together show that our brains aren't just looking for the signs; we're also looking at many other aspects of the situation and even taking into account past experience (e.g. is this an intersection? Have I seen a stop sign here before? If I'm new to this area, I'm likely going to be far more alert to the signage.) If someone planted a (non-modified) stop sign on the side of a highway, where the road is completely straight and with no intersection, I bet some drivers won't even see it, those who do will be puzzled, and approximately none of them will even try to stop.

asadjb 9y ago

A more comprehensive world model. And the ability to realise that we may be interpreting an external stimulus incorrectly, and acting cautiously when that happens.

Someone 9y ago

Possibly that we aren't trained on different training sets. In particular, I think most machine learning training sets have way too many positives. For example, for every second you see a traffic sign, there likely are a hundred or more where we don't see one (especially in our youth) Also, the claim that humans excel at this can be called anthropocentrism. You could also point at the features those machine learning algorithms use and say "why don't humans see these very prominent features?"

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

visarga 9y ago

Humans have weird edge cases as well. There are hundreds of visual "illusions".

ioquatix 9y ago

I'll give a counterpoint based on my own experience. When I travelled to the US, from New Zealand, to interview with a certain large company, I actually managed to mis-read road signs, in particular traffic lights, on a number of occasions, much to my alarm. I am not a bad driver - and there were a number of factors - perhaps being tired from the trip, so, it isn't clear cut. But, I remember feeling like the traffic lights just didn't look like traffic lights - the intersections just felt off - so off, that I actually failed to recognise them in some instances. It was actually a bit upsetting at the time, I've never quite experienced anything like it, but I think it's possible that the human system can fail to work if the input is sufficiently different from what is "typical".

taneq 9y ago
To be fair, this was in Christchurch not too long after one of the bigger earthquakes but I got severely messed around by the ambiguity of some of the road signs, to the point where I once ended up on the wrong side of the road.

stordoff 9y ago

We designed the signs to fit the human vision system, and the modifications target a different vision system. I imagine there will be similar edge cases that fool human vision.

pishpash 9y ago
Not even very clever edge cases, but consider that birds see more of the spectrum than humans, there are designs that are visible to birds but invisible to humans. There, we just found examples that are adversarially designed to blind humans but are so obvious to a bird: it wasn't that hard!

IanCal 9y ago

These edge cases are designed specifically knowing the structure of (or at least being able to run large numbers of experiments on) the system in question. We can't do that with humans. So we don't know what similar situations we could create if we did.