Human Eyes–Inspired Recurrent Neural Networks Are More Robust Against Adversarial Noises

Humans actively observe the visual surroundings by focusing on salient objects and ignoring trivial details. However, computer vision models based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) often analyze visual input all at once through a single feedforward pass. In this study, we designed a dual-stream vision model inspired by the human brain. This model features retina-like input layers and includes two streams: one determining the next point of focus (the fixation), while the other interprets the visuals surrounding the fixation. Trained on image recognition, this model examines an image through a sequence of fixations, each time focusing on different parts, thereby progressively building a representation of the image. We evaluated this model against various benchmarks in terms of object recognition, gaze behavior, and adversarial robustness. Our findings suggest that the model can attend and gaze in ways similar to humans without being explicitly trained to mimic human attention and that the model can enhance robustness against adversarial attacks due to its retinal sampling and recurrent processing. In particular, the model can correct its perceptual errors by taking more glances, setting itself apart from all feedforward-only models. In conclusion, the interactions of retinal sampling, eye movement, and recurrent dynamics are important to human-like visual exploration and inference.