Seeing is not always believing: The Space of Harmless Perturbations

In the context of deep neural networks, we expose the existence of a harmless perturbation space, where perturbations leave the network output entirely unaltered. Perturbations within this harmless perturbation space, regardless of their magnitude when applied to images, exhibit no impact on the network's outputs of the original images. Specifically, given any linear layer within the network, where the input dimension n exceeds the output dimension m, we demonstrate the existence of a continuous harmless perturbation subspace with a dimension of (n-m). Inspired by this, we solve for a family of general perturbations that consistently influence the network output, irrespective of their magnitudes. With these theoretical findings, we explore the application of harmless perturbations for privacy-preserving data usage. Our work reveals the difference between DNNs and human perception that the significant perturbations captured by humans may not affect the recognition of DNNs. As a result, we utilize this gap to design a type of harmless perturbation that is meaningless for humans while maintaining its recognizable features for DNNs.