keyword
AlexNet architecture
AlexNet architecture is a pioneering deep convolutional neural network designed for image classification and computer vision tasks. Introduced in 2012 by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton, the network comprises eight learned layers consisting of five convolutional layers, some followed by max-pooling, and three fully connected layers ending in a softmax classifier. It achieved a breakthrough reduction in error rates on the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge by leveraging parallel graphics processing units for accelerated training. The architecture popularized several foundational deep learning techniques, including Rectified Linear Unit activation functions for faster convergence, dropout regularization to mitigate overfitting, and data augmentation to enhance generalization, serving as a primary catalyst for the widespread adoption of modern deep learning.
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Poison Frogs! Targeted Clean-Label Poisoning Attacks on Neural Networks
Ali Shafahi, W. R. Huang, Mahyar Najibi, Octavian Suciu, Christoph Studer, Tudor Dumitras, T. Goldstein
Why you should read this
Demonstrates how adversaries can force neural networks to misclassify specific test instances using correctly labeled training images, establishing that models trained via transfer learning or end-to-end pipelines are vulnerable to stealthy clean-label data poisoning.
Data poisoning is an attack on machine learning models wherein the attacker adds examples to the training set to manipulate the behavior of the model at test time. This paper explores poisoning attacks on neural nets. The proposed attacks use "clean-labels"; they don't require the attacker to have any control over the labeling of training data. They are also targeted; they control the behavior of the classifier on a test instance without degrading overall classifier performance. For example, an attacker could add a seemingly innocuous image (that is properly labeled) to a training set for a face recognition engine, and control the identity of a chosen person at test time. Because the attacker does not need to control the labeling function, poisons could be entered into the training set simply by leaving them on the web and waiting for them to be scraped by a data collection bot. We present an optimization-based method for crafting poisons, and show that just one single poison image can control classifier behavior when transfer learning is used. For full end-to-end training, we present a "watermarking" strategy that makes poisoning reliable using multiple (50) poisoned training instances. We demonstrate our method by generating poisoned frog images from the CIFAR dataset and using them to manipulate image classifiers.
Added
2026-09-25

A survey of the recent architectures of deep convolutional neural networks
Asifullah Khan, Anabia Sohail, Umme Zahoora, Aqsa Saeed Qureshi
Why you should read this
Classifies recent deep convolutional neural network architectures into seven structural categories—including spatial exploitation, depth, multi-path routing, and attention mechanisms—to explain the design principles driving modern computer vision systems.
Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is a special type of Neural Networks, which has shown exemplary performance on several competitions related to Computer Vision and Image Processing. Some of the exciting application areas of CNN include Image Classification and Segmentation, Object Detection, Video Processing, Natural Language Processing, and Speech Recognition. The powerful learning ability of deep CNN is primarily due to the use of multiple feature extraction stages that can automatically learn representations from the data. The availability of a large amount of data and improvement in the hardware technology has accelerated the research in CNNs, and recently interesting deep CNN architectures have been reported. Several inspiring ideas to bring advancements in CNNs have been explored, such as the use of different activation and loss functions, parameter optimization, regularization, and architectural innovations. However, the significant improvement in the representational capacity of the deep CNN is achieved through architectural innovations. Notably, the ideas of exploiting spatial and channel information, depth and width of architecture, and multi-path information processing have gained substantial attention. Similarly, the idea of using a block of layers as a structural unit is also gaining popularity. This survey thus focuses on the intrinsic taxonomy present in the recently reported deep CNN architectures and, consequently, classifies the recent innovations in CNN architectures into seven different categories. These seven categories are based on spatial exploitation, depth, multi-path, width, feature-map exploitation, channel boosting, and attention. Additionally, the elementary understanding of CNN components, current challenges, and applications of CNN are also provided.
Added
2026-09-14
