AdvNav: Behavior-Guided Black-Box Adversarial Attacks on Vision-Language Navigation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11063v2
• Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2026 04:50:04 GMT
• Title: AdvNav: Behavior-Guided Black-Box Adversarial Attacks on Vision-Language Navigation
• Abstract summary: AdvNav is a behavior-guided black-box adversarial attack framework.<n>It disturbs an agent's first-person views during navigation.<n>It was evaluated against Transformer-based HAMT and MapGPT with two types of backbones on R2R dataset.
• Score: 22.01905444679521
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Despite progress in Embodied AI, Vision-and-Language Navigation systems remain vulnerable to adversarial visual disturbances. Most existing methods rely on white-box access to target model gradients, which is often unrealistic for real-world deployed systems and computationally exhaustive due to recursive backpropagation for optimization, limiting their applicability. While previous black-box methods predominantly target single-step, instantaneous decision tasks, they struggle to handle the task complexities and temporal dependencies. This highlights the need for a gradient-free attack method that can effectively disrupt the multistep sequential perception-action loop using only observable inputs and outputs. Therefore, we propose AdvNav, a behavior-guided black-box adversarial attack framework that disturbs an agent's first-person views during navigation. To construct an informative surrogate objective for effective optimization guidance in gradient-free search under the black-box setting, we design a dual-granularity behavior-based feedback, aggregating a trajectory-level performance score representing overall navigation degradation, an action-level reward score considering the potential decision risk, and a deviation indicator, all of which are extracted from the agent's self-output behaviors. This feedback guides a hybrid optimization strategy that heuristically tunes perturbation strength via adaptive updates and evolves noise spatial structure genetically, to iteratively discover the most disruptive noise configuration. Evaluated against Transformer-based HAMT and LLM-based MapGPT with two types of backbones on R2R dataset, AdvNav achieves 49.70/65.96/87.30% Attack Success Rate. The result demonstrates the effectiveness and generality of AdvNav, reveals critical perception vulnerabilities and offers insights for the design of future resilient VLN models.

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