A Rotation and a Translation Suffice: Fooling CNNs with Simple Transformations

We show that simple transformations, namely translations and rotations alone, are sufficient to fool neural network-based vision models on a significant fraction of inputs. This is in sharp contrast to previous work that relied on more complicated optimization approaches that are unlikely to appear outside of a truly adversarial setting. Moreover, fooling rotations and translations are easy to find and require only a few black-box queries to the target model. Overall, our findings emphasize the need for designing robust classifiers even in natural, benign contexts.