# Err on the Side of Texture: Texture Bias on Real Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10597 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10597/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (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)
- [The Limitations of Deep Learning in Adversarial Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07528/) (2015)
- [Universal adversarial perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.08401/) (2016)
- [Network Dissection: Quantifying Interpretability of Deep Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05796/) (2017)
- [Evasion Attacks against Machine Learning at Test Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06131/) (2017)
- [A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.06576/) (2015)
- [Approximating CNNs with Bag-of-local-Features models works surprisingly well on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00760/) (2019)
- [Generalisation in humans and deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08750/) (2018)
- [Shape-Texture Debiased Neural Network Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05981/) (2020)
- [Interpreting Adversarially Trained Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09797/) (2019)
- [Learning with a Strong Adversary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.03034/) (2015)
- [The shape and simplicity biases of adversarially robust ImageNet-trained CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09373/) (2020)
- [Color Channel Perturbation Attacks for Fooling Convolutional Neural Networks and A Defense Against Such Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14456/) (2020)
- [Explorations in Texture Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09543/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Alignment and Adversarial Robustness: Are More Human-Like Models More Secure?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12377/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Bias significantly undermines both the accuracy and trustworthiness of machine learning models. To date, one of the strongest biases observed in image classification models is texture bias-where models overly rely on texture information rather than shape information. Yet, existing approaches for measuring and mitigating texture bias have not been able to capture how textures impact model robustness in real-world settings. In this work, we introduce the Texture Association Value (TAV), a novel metric that quantifies how strongly models rely on the presence of specific textures when classifying objects. Leveraging TAV, we demonstrate that model accuracy and robustness are heavily influenced by texture. Our results show that texture bias explains the existence of natural adversarial examples, where over 90% of these samples contain textures that are misaligned with the learned texture of their true label, resulting in confident mispredictions.