Beyond the Pixels: Exploring the Effects of Bit-Level Network and File Corruptions on Video Model Robustness

We investigate the robustness of video machine learning models to bit-level network and file corruptions, which can arise from network transmission failures or hardware errors, and explore defenses against such corruptions. We simulate network and file corruptions at multiple corruption levels, and find that bit-level corruptions can cause substantial performance drops on common action recognition and multi-object tracking tasks. We explore two types of defenses against bit-level corruptions: corruption-agnostic and corruption-aware defenses. We find that corruption-agnostic defenses such as adversarial training have limited effectiveness, performing up to 11.3 accuracy points worse than a no-defense baseline. In response, we propose Bit-corruption Augmented Training (BAT), a corruption-aware baseline that exploits knowledge of bit-level corruptions to enforce model invariance to such corruptions. BAT outperforms corruption-agnostic defenses, recovering up to 7.1 accuracy points over a no-defense baseline on highly-corrupted videos while maintaining competitive performance on clean/near-clean data.