Hijacking Vision-and-Language Navigation Agents with Adversarial Environmental Attacks

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Yang, Zijiao, Shi, Xiangxi, Slyman, Eric, Lee, Stefan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Yang, Zijiao
Shi, Xiangxi
Slyman, Eric
Lee, Stefan
author_facet Yang, Zijiao
Shi, Xiangxi
Slyman, Eric
Lee, Stefan
contents Assistive embodied agents that can be instructed in natural language to perform tasks in open-world environments have the potential to significantly impact labor tasks like manufacturing or in-home care -- benefiting the lives of those who come to depend on them. In this work, we consider how this benefit might be hijacked by local modifications in the appearance of the agent's operating environment. Specifically, we take the popular Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task as a representative setting and develop a whitebox adversarial attack that optimizes a 3D attack object's appearance to induce desired behaviors in pretrained VLN agents that observe it in the environment. We demonstrate that the proposed attack can cause VLN agents to ignore their instructions and execute alternative actions after encountering the attack object -- even for instructions and agent paths not considered when optimizing the attack. For these novel settings, we find our attacks can induce early-termination behaviors or divert an agent along an attacker-defined multi-step trajectory. Under both conditions, environmental attacks significantly reduce agent capabilities to successfully follow user instructions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_02795
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hijacking Vision-and-Language Navigation Agents with Adversarial Environmental Attacks
Yang, Zijiao
Shi, Xiangxi
Slyman, Eric
Lee, Stefan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
Assistive embodied agents that can be instructed in natural language to perform tasks in open-world environments have the potential to significantly impact labor tasks like manufacturing or in-home care -- benefiting the lives of those who come to depend on them. In this work, we consider how this benefit might be hijacked by local modifications in the appearance of the agent's operating environment. Specifically, we take the popular Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task as a representative setting and develop a whitebox adversarial attack that optimizes a 3D attack object's appearance to induce desired behaviors in pretrained VLN agents that observe it in the environment. We demonstrate that the proposed attack can cause VLN agents to ignore their instructions and execute alternative actions after encountering the attack object -- even for instructions and agent paths not considered when optimizing the attack. For these novel settings, we find our attacks can induce early-termination behaviors or divert an agent along an attacker-defined multi-step trajectory. Under both conditions, environmental attacks significantly reduce agent capabilities to successfully follow user instructions.
title Hijacking Vision-and-Language Navigation Agents with Adversarial Environmental Attacks
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02795