# Does resistance to style-transfer equal Global Shape Bias? Measuring network sensitivity to global shape configuration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07555 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07555/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [SmoothGrad: removing noise by adding noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03825/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Examples Are Not Bugs, They Are Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02175/) (2019)
- [MnasNet: Platform-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Mobile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11626/) (2018)
- [ConvNeXt V2: Co-designing and Scaling ConvNets with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00808/) (2023)
- [Explaining Explanations: An Overview of Interpretability of Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00069/) (2018)
- [DeiT III: Revenge of the ViT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07118/) (2022)
- [Vision Transformers are Robust Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07581/) (2021)
- [Partial success in closing the gap between human and machine vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07411/) (2021)
- [FFCV: Accelerating Training by Removing Data Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12517/) (2023)
- [A Systematic Review of Robustness in Deep Learning for Computer Vision: Mind the gap?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00639/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Intrinsic Image Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03678/) (2017)
- [SurfGen: Adversarial 3D Shape Synthesis with Explicit Surface Discriminators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00112/) (2022)
- [Increasing Shape Bias in ImageNet-Trained Networks Using Transfer Learning and Domain-Adversarial Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12892/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Visual Anagrams Reveal Hidden Differences in Holistic Shape Processing Across Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00493/) (2025)
- [On the Reliability of Cue Conflict and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10834/) (2026)
- [Revealing the Gap in Human and VLM Scene Perception through Counterfactual Semantic Saliency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13047/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning models are known to exhibit a strong texture bias, while human tends to rely heavily on global shape structure for object recognition. The current benchmark for evaluating a model's global shape bias is a set of style-transferred images with the assumption that resistance to the attack of style transfer is related to the development of global structure sensitivity in the model. In this work, we show that networks trained with style-transfer images indeed learn to ignore style, but its shape bias arises primarily from local detail. We provide a Disrupted Structure Testbench (DiST) as a direct measurement of global structure sensitivity. Our test includes 2400 original images from ImageNet-1K, each of which is accompanied by two images with the global shapes of the original image disrupted while preserving its texture via the texture synthesis program. We found that textcolorblack(1) models that performed well on the previous cue-conflict dataset do not fare well in the proposed DiST; (2) the supervised trained Vision Transformer (ViT) lose its global spatial information from positional embedding, leading to no significant advantages over Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on DiST. While self-supervised learning methods, especially mask autoencoder significantly improves the global structure sensitivity of ViT. (3) Improving the global structure sensitivity is orthogonal to resistance to style-transfer, indicating that the relationship between global shape structure and local texture detail is not an either/or relationship. Training with DiST images and style-transferred images are complementary, and can be combined to train network together to enhance the global shape sensitivity and robustness of local features. Our code will be hosted in github: https://github.com/leelabcnbc/DiST