arXiv:2510.27623v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have propelled embodied agents by enabling direct perception, reasoning, and planning task-oriented actions from visual inputs. However, such vision-driven embodied agents open a new attack surface: visual backdoor attacks, where the agent behaves normally until a visual trigger appears in the scene, then persistently executes an attacker-specified multi-step policy. We introduce BEAT, the first framework to inject such visual backdoors into VLM-based embodied agents using objects in the environments as triggers. Unlike textual triggers, object triggers exhibit wide variation across viewpoints and lighting, making them difficult to implant reliably. BEAT addresses this challenge by (1) constructing a training set that spans diverse scenes, tasks, and trigger placements to expose agents to trigger variability, and (2) introducing a two-stage training scheme that first applies supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and then our novel Contrastive Trigger Learning (CTL). CTL formulates trigger discrimination as preference learning between trigger-present and trigger-free inputs, explicitly sharpening the decision boundaries to ensure precise backdoor activation. Across various embodied agent benchmarks and VLMs, BEAT achieves attack success rates up to 80%, while maintaining strong benign task performance, and generalizes reliably to out-of-distribution trigger placements. Notably, compared to naive SFT, CTL boosts backdoor activation accuracy up to 39% under limited backdoor data. These findings expose a critical yet unexplored security risk in VLM-based embodied agents, underscoring the need for robust defenses before real-world deployment.

arXiv:2204.07520v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-robot decision-making is the process where multiple robots coordinate actions. In this paper, we aim for efficient and effective multi-robot decision-making despite the robots' limited on-board resources and the often resource-demanding complexity of their tasks. We introduce the first algorithm enabling the robots to choose with which few other robots to coordinate and provably balance the trade-off of centralized vs. decentralized coordination. Particularly, centralization favors globally near-optimal decision-making but at the cost of increased on-board resource requirements; whereas, decentralization favors minimal resource requirements but at a global suboptimality cost. All robots can thus afford our algorithm, irrespective of their resources. We are motivated by the future of autonomy that involves multiple robots coordinating actions to complete resource-demanding tasks, such as target tracking, area coverage, and monitoring. To provide closed-form guarantees, we focus on maximization problems involving monotone and 2nd-order submodular functions. To capture the cost of decentralization, we introduce the notion of Centralization Of Information among non-Neighbors (COIN). We validate our algorithm in simulated scenarios of image covering.