English Reference

Word

perturbation

Phoneticsper·tur·ba·tion

US/ˌpɝtɝˈbeɪʃən/

UK/pətəbˈeɪʃən/

Definition

n. a small, intentional change made to an input, system, or setting to see how it responds.

n. a minor deviation, disturbance, or deliberate modification applied to input data, weights, or activations to evaluate system sensitivity, robustness, or causality.

Examples

“Adding subtle digital noise to the image was a perturbation designed to test the camera sensor.”

“Adversarial attacks introduce an imperceptible pixel perturbation that tricks the image model into misclassification.”

“Activation patching applies targeted representation perturbation at runtime to determine the causal role of individual layers in factual recall tasks.”

Examples

simple

“Adding subtle digital noise to the image was a perturbation designed to test the camera sensor.”

contextual

“Adversarial attacks introduce an imperceptible pixel perturbation that tricks the image model into misclassification.”

complex

“Activation patching applies targeted representation perturbation at runtime to determine the causal role of individual layers in factual recall tasks.”

Real-World Examples

“We introduce a novel metric ρ to quantitatively assess a classifier’s robustness against single-word perturbation.”
arxiv.org · 1 Jan 2024

Etymology

From Latin perturbatio ('confusion, disturbance'), from perturbare ('to confuse, disturb thoroughly'), from per- ('thoroughly') + turbare ('to agitate, disturb').

Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Domains

AIAstronomyComputingPhysics

This entry

Level
C1 · Advanced
Frequency
Occasional
Updated

Scan code

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English Reference