{"ID":2878780,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18539","arxiv_id":"2508.18539","title":"Adaptive Visual Navigation Assistant in 3D RPGs","abstract":"In complex 3D game environments, players rely on visual affordances to spot map transition points. Efficient identification of such points is important to client-side auto-mapping, and provides an objective basis for evaluating map cue presentation. In this work, we formalize the task of detecting traversable Spatial Transition Points (STPs)-connectors between two sub regions-and selecting the singular Main STP (MSTP), the unique STP that lies on the designer-intended critical path toward the player's current macro-objective, from a single game frame, proposing this as a new research focus. We introduce a two-stage deep-learning pipeline that first detects potential STPs using Faster R-CNN and then ranks them with a lightweight MSTP selector that fuses local and global visual features. Both stages benefit from parameter-efficient adapters, and we further introduce an optional retrieval-augmented fusion step. Our primary goal is to establish the feasibility of this problem and set baseline performance metrics. We validate our approach on a custom-built, diverse dataset collected from five Action RPG titles. Our experiments reveal a key trade-off: while full-network fine-tuning produces superior STP detection with sufficient data, adapter-only transfer is significantly more robust and effective in low-data scenarios and for the MSTP selection task. By defining this novel problem, providing a baseline pipeline and dataset, and offering initial insights into efficient model adaptation, we aim to contribute to future AI-driven navigation aids and data-informed level-design tools.","short_abstract":"In complex 3D game environments, players rely on visual affordances to spot map transition points. Efficient identification of such points is important to client-side auto-mapping, and provides an objective basis for evaluating map cue presentation. In this work, we formalize the task of detecting traversable Spatial T...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18539","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18539v2","authors":"[\"Kaijie Xu\",\"Clark Verbrugge\"]","published":"2025-08-25T22:20:37Z","proceeding":"cs.CV","tasks":"[\"cs.CV\"]","methods":"[\"Convolutional Neural Network\"]","has_code":false}