Definition
Plain language
Painting over any writing in a picture before showing it to the model, so it cannot read it.
As stated in the literature
A preprocessing defense that runs text detection over an input image and occludes detected regions with solid fill, eliminating the in-scene text channel at the cost of legitimate label and signage reading.
Also called: masking, masked
Why it matters: It shuts down an entire attack channel outright, but at the price of blinding the system to legitimate signs, labels, and street names it may need to do its job.
For example, a delivery robot's camera feed could have every stretch of visible writing covered with grey boxes so that a note taped to a wall saying "go through this door" never reaches the model.
Heard on the show
“When Swift is generating a workflow for, say, GSM8K, every trace of GSM8K — the training data, the error logs, the workflows previously optimized for it — is masked from the prompt.”Episode 013 — Why Search Keeps Rediscovering the Same Workflow, and What That Means