# Butterfly Effect Attack: Tiny and Seemingly Unrelated Perturbations for Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.07483 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07483/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [DeepFool: a simple and accurate method to fool deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04599/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Machine Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01236/) (2016)
- [Delving into Transferable Adversarial Examples and Black-box Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02770/) (2016)
- [Transferability in Machine Learning: from Phenomena to Black-Box Attacks using Adversarial Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07277/) (2016)
- [Adversarial Attacks and Defenses in Images, Graphs and Text: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08072/) (2019)
- [GenAttack: Practical Black-box Attacks with Gradient-Free Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11090/) (2018)
- [Ensemble Methods as a Defense to Adversarial Perturbations Against Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.03423/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Examples on Object Recognition: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04094/) (2020)
- [Metamorphic Testing for Object Detection Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12162/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work aims to explore and identify tiny and seemingly unrelated perturbations of images in object detection that will lead to performance degradation. While tininess can naturally be defined using Lp norms, we characterize the degree of "unrelatedness" of an object by the pixel distance between the occurred perturbation and the object. Triggering errors in prediction while satisfying two objectives can be formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem where we utilize genetic algorithms to guide the search. The result successfully demonstrates that (invisible) perturbations on the right part of the image can drastically change the outcome of object detection on the left. An extensive evaluation reaffirms our conjecture that transformer-based object detection networks are more susceptible to butterfly effects in comparison to single-stage object detection networks such as YOLOv5.