Across Viewpoints and Time: Trajectory-Generalizable Physical Attacks on World Models and Video Understanding Models

Abstract

World models and video understanding models are increasingly deployed in dynamic visual environments, yet their robustness to physical adversarial threats remains largely underexplored. We study whether a single physical adversarial texture can mislead the victim model across different real-world scenarios where observing viewpoints vary along uncontrolled object--camera trajectories. We identify that heterogeneous video semantics and trajectories induce poorly aligned gradients for optimizing the adversarial texture. To address that, we propose the Trajectory-aware adversarial Alignment and Refinement Attack (TARA), which incorporates trajectory-aware optimization to capture the evolving geometric variations of a printed texture under real-world scenarios. To improve cross-instance optimization compatibility, TARA incorporates trajectory-aware contrastive alignment to encourage attacked representations from diverse video--trajectory instances to approach a shared adversarial region and then performs trajectory-aware task refinement to translate the aligned representation into task-level prediction errors. For reproducible evaluation, we develop a geometry-grounded tracking pipeline that provides physically plausible adversarial regions with temporally consistent trajectories on EPIC-KITCHENS-100 and Something-Something V2. We further collect real-world print-and-recapture videos to validate attack effectiveness under physical deployment conditions. Together, the annotated benchmarks and real-world captured data form a reproducible testbed for future evaluation. Notably, our results reveal that a single printable adversarial texture can persistently disrupt world models and video understanding models under physical conditions, highlighting the fundamental security challenge.