Schrödinger's Navigator: Imagining an Ensemble of Futures for Zero-Shot Object Navigation

Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) requires a robot to locate a target object in a previously unseen environment without relying on pre-built maps or task-specific training. However, existing ZSON methods often struggle in realistic and cluttered environments, particularly when the scene contains heavy occlusions, unknown risks, or dynamically moving target objects. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{Schrödinger's Navigator}, a navigation framework inspired by Schrödinger's thought experiment on uncertainty. The framework treats unobserved space as a set of plausible future worlds and reasons over them before acting. Conditioned on egocentric visual inputs and three candidate trajectories, a trajectory-conditioned 3D world model imagines future observations along each path. This enables the agent to see beyond occlusions and anticipate risks in unseen regions without requiring extra detours or dense global mapping. The imagined 3D observations are fused into the navigation map and used to update a value map. These updates guide the policy toward trajectories that avoid occlusions, reduce exposure to uncertain space, and better track moving targets. Experiments on a Go2 quadruped robot across three challenging scenarios, including severe static occlusions, unknown risks, and dynamically moving targets, show that Schrödinger's Navigator consistently outperforms strong ZSON baselines in self-localization, object localization, and overall Success Rate in occlusion-heavy environments. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of trajectory-conditioned 3D imagination in enabling robust zero-shot object navigation.

How AI Agents Follow the Herd of AI? Network Effects, History, and Machine Optimism

Understanding decision-making in multi-AI-agent frameworks is crucial for analyzing strategic interactions in network-effect-driven contexts. This study investigates how AI agents navigate network-effect games, where individual payoffs depend on peer participatio--a context underexplored in multi-agent systems despite its real-world prevalence. We introduce a novel workflow design using large language model (LLM)-based agents in repeated decision-making scenarios, systematically manipulating price trajectories (fixed, ascending, descending, random) and network-effect strength. Our key findings include: First, without historical data, agents fail to infer equilibrium. Second, ordered historical sequences (e.g., escalating prices) enable partial convergence under weak network effects but strong effects trigger persistent "AI optimism"--agents overestimate participation despite contradictory evidence. Third, randomized history disrupts convergence entirely, demonstrating that temporal coherence in data shapes LLMs' reasoning, unlike humans. These results highlight a paradigm shift: in AI-mediated systems, equilibrium outcomes depend not just on incentives, but on how history is curated, which is impossible for human.

Reconstruction as a Bridge for Event-Based Visual Question Answering

Integrating event cameras with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) promises general scene understanding in challenging visual conditions, yet requires navigating a trade-off between preserving the unique advantages of event data and ensuring compatibility with frame-based models. We address this challenge by using reconstruction as a bridge, proposing a straightforward Frame-based Reconstruction and Tokenization (FRT) method and designing an efficient Adaptive Reconstruction and Tokenization (ART) method that leverages event sparsity. For robust evaluation, we introduce EvQA, the first objective, real-world benchmark for event-based MLLMs, comprising 1,000 event-Q&A pairs from 22 public datasets. Our experiments demonstrate that our methods achieve state-of-the-art performance on EvQA, highlighting the significant potential of MLLMs in event-based vision.

Teach2Eval: An Indirect Evaluation Method for LLM by Judging How It Teaches

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has outpaced the development of effective evaluation methods. Traditional benchmarks rely on task-specific metrics and static datasets, which often suffer from fairness issues, limited scalability, and contamination risks. In this paper, we introduce Teach2Eval, an indirect evaluation framework inspired by the Feynman Technique. Instead of directly testing LLMs on predefined tasks, our method evaluates a model's multiple abilities to teach weaker student models to perform tasks effectively. By converting open-ended tasks into standardized multiple-choice questions (MCQs) through teacher-generated feedback, Teach2Eval enables scalable, automated, and multi-dimensional assessment. Our approach not only avoids data leakage and memorization but also captures a broad range of cognitive abilities that are orthogonal to current benchmarks. Experimental results across 26 leading LLMs show strong alignment with existing human and model-based dynamic rankings, while offering additional interpretability for training guidance.

StageDesigner: Artistic Stage Generation for Scenography via Theater Scripts

In this work, we introduce StageDesigner, the first comprehensive framework for artistic stage generation using large language models combined with layout-controlled diffusion models. Given the professional requirements of stage scenography, StageDesigner simulates the workflows of seasoned artists to generate immersive 3D stage scenes. Specifically, our approach is divided into three primary modules: Script Analysis, which extracts thematic and spatial cues from input scripts; Foreground Generation, which constructs and arranges essential 3D objects; and Background Generation, which produces a harmonious background aligned with the narrative atmosphere and maintains spatial coherence by managing occlusions between foreground and background elements. Furthermore, we introduce the StagePro-V1 dataset, a dedicated dataset with 276 unique stage scenes spanning different historical styles and annotated with scripts, images, and detailed 3D layouts, specifically tailored for this task. Finally, evaluations using both standard and newly proposed metrics, along with extensive user studies, demonstrate the effectiveness of StageDesigner. Project can be found at: https://deadsmither5.github.io/2025/01/03/StageDesigner/

ArtNVG: Content-Style Separated Artistic Neighboring-View Gaussian Stylization

As demand from the film and gaming industries for 3D scenes with target styles grows, the importance of advanced 3D stylization techniques increases. However, recent methods often struggle to maintain local consistency in color and texture throughout stylized scenes, which is essential for maintaining aesthetic coherence. To solve this problem, this paper introduces ArtNVG, an innovative 3D stylization framework that efficiently generates stylized 3D scenes by leveraging reference style images. Built on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), ArtNVG achieves rapid optimization and rendering while upholding high reconstruction quality. Our framework realizes high-quality 3D stylization by incorporating two pivotal techniques: Content-Style Separated Control and Attention-based Neighboring-View Alignment. Content-Style Separated Control uses the CSGO model and the Tile ControlNet to decouple the content and style control, reducing risks of information leakage. Concurrently, Attention-based Neighboring-View Alignment ensures consistency of local colors and textures across neighboring views, significantly improving visual quality. Extensive experiments validate that ArtNVG surpasses existing methods, delivering superior results in content preservation, style alignment, and local consistency.

DiffPatch: Generating Customizable Adversarial Patches using Diffusion Model

Physical adversarial patches printed on clothing can easily allow individuals to evade person detectors. However, most existing adversarial patch generation methods prioritize attack effectiveness over stealthiness, resulting in patches that are aesthetically unpleasing. Although existing methods using generative adversarial networks or diffusion models can produce more natural-looking patches, they often struggle to balance stealthiness with attack effectiveness and lack flexibility for user customization. To address these challenges, we propose a novel diffusion-based customizable patch generation framework termed DiffPatch, specifically tailored for creating naturalistic and customizable adversarial patches. Our approach enables users to utilize a reference image as the source, rather than starting from random noise, and incorporates masks to craft naturalistic patches of various shapes, not limited to squares. To prevent the original semantics from being lost during the diffusion process, we employ Null-text inversion to map random noise samples to a single input image and generate patches through Incomplete Diffusion Optimization (IDO). Notably, while maintaining a natural appearance, our method achieves a comparable attack performance to state-of-the-art non-naturalistic patches when using similarly sized attacks. Using DiffPatch, we have created a physical adversarial T-shirt dataset, AdvPatch-1K, specifically targeting YOLOv5s. This dataset includes over a thousand images across diverse scenarios, validating the effectiveness of our attack in real-world environments. Moreover, it provides a valuable resource for future research.

DogLayout: Denoising Diffusion GAN for Discrete and Continuous Layout Generation

Layout Generation aims to synthesize plausible arrangements from given elements. Currently, the predominant methods in layout generation are Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and diffusion models, each presenting its own set of challenges. GANs typically struggle with handling discrete data due to their requirement for differentiable generated samples and have historically circumvented the direct generation of discrete labels by treating them as fixed conditions. Conversely, diffusion-based models, despite achieving state-of-the-art performance across several metrics, require extensive sampling steps which lead to significant time costs. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{DogLayout} (\textbf{D}en\textbf{o}ising Diffusion \textbf{G}AN \textbf{Layout} model), which integrates a diffusion process into GANs to enable the generation of discrete label data and significantly reduce diffusion's sampling time. Experiments demonstrate that DogLayout considerably reduces sampling costs by up to 175 times and cuts overlap from 16.43 to 9.59 compared to existing diffusion models, while also surpassing GAN based and other layout methods. Code is available at https://github.com/deadsmither5/DogLayout.

Towards Million-Scale Adversarial Robustness Evaluation With Stronger Individual Attacks

As deep learning models are increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications, evaluating their vulnerabilities to adversarial perturbations is essential for ensuring their reliability and trustworthiness. Over the past decade, a large number of white-box adversarial robustness evaluation methods (i.e., attacks) have been proposed, ranging from single-step to multi-step methods and from individual to ensemble methods. Despite these advances, challenges remain in conducting meaningful and comprehensive robustness evaluations, particularly when it comes to large-scale testing and ensuring evaluations reflect real-world adversarial risks. In this work, we focus on image classification models and propose a novel individual attack method, Probability Margin Attack (PMA), which defines the adversarial margin in the probability space rather than the logits space. We analyze the relationship between PMA and existing cross-entropy or logits-margin-based attacks, and show that PMA can outperform the current state-of-the-art individual methods. Building on PMA, we propose two types of ensemble attacks that balance effectiveness and efficiency. Furthermore, we create a million-scale dataset, CC1M, derived from the existing CC3M dataset, and use it to conduct the first million-scale white-box adversarial robustness evaluation of adversarially-trained ImageNet models. Our findings provide valuable insights into the robustness gaps between individual versus ensemble attacks and small-scale versus million-scale evaluations.

White-box Multimodal Jailbreaks Against Large Vision-Language Models

Recent advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have underscored their superiority in various multimodal tasks. However, the adversarial robustness of VLMs has not been fully explored. Existing methods mainly assess robustness through unimodal adversarial attacks that perturb images, while assuming inherent resilience against text-based attacks. Different from existing attacks, in this work we propose a more comprehensive strategy that jointly attacks both text and image modalities to exploit a broader spectrum of vulnerability within VLMs. Specifically, we propose a dual optimization objective aimed at guiding the model to generate affirmative responses with high toxicity. Our attack method begins by optimizing an adversarial image prefix from random noise to generate diverse harmful responses in the absence of text input, thus imbuing the image with toxic semantics. Subsequently, an adversarial text suffix is integrated and co-optimized with the adversarial image prefix to maximize the probability of eliciting affirmative responses to various harmful instructions. The discovered adversarial image prefix and text suffix are collectively denoted as a Universal Master Key (UMK). When integrated into various malicious queries, UMK can circumvent the alignment defenses of VLMs and lead to the generation of objectionable content, known as jailbreaks. The experimental results demonstrate that our universal attack strategy can effectively jailbreak MiniGPT-4 with a 96% success rate, highlighting the vulnerability of VLMs and the urgent need for new alignment strategies.