DiffVAS: Diffusion-Guided Visual Active Search in Partially Observable Environments

arXiv:2605.15519v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual active search (VAS) has been introduced as a modeling framework that leverages visual cues to direct aerial (e.g., UAV-based) exploration and pinpoint areas of interest within extensive geospatial regions. Potential applications of VAS include detecting hotspots for rare wildlife poaching, aiding search-and-rescue missions, and uncovering illegal trafficking of weapons, among other uses. Previous VAS approaches assume that the entire searc