arXiv AI

Silent Failures in Physical AI: A Literature Review of Runtime Action Authorization for Autonomous Systems

arXiv:2606. 00090v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical AI systems increasingly map multimodal observations, language instructions, and learned world representations into physically consequential actions.

arXiv AI
Jul 31

Towards Trustworthy Embodied Intelligence: A Systems Framework and Graded Trustworthiness Levels

arXiv:2607. 26121v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embodied intelligence integrates learned perception and decision making with real-time computation, control, and physical interaction.

By Xinyu Yang, Tianxing Chen, Honghao Su, Minxuan Wang, Chenze Yu, Zhangzheng Tu, Yue Chen, Yuxiao Huo, Lingfeng Zhang, Yan Huang, Yan Qin, Shaolong Zhu, Qiwei Liang, Hekun Tian, Shujia Liu, Guangyu Chen, Junhao Gong, Zixuan Li, Wenwei Lin, Zijian Lin, Wenxuan Zhu, Eric J Chen, Yue Yuan, Qize Yu, Jiaqi Liang, Haowen Yan, Hengfei Zhao, Weijie Wan, Zikun Xiao, Junyuan Tang, Baijun Chen, Kai-Chong Lei, Kaixuan Wang, Kailun Su, Zanxin Chen, Yao Mu, Renjing Xu, Chuqiao Lyu, Qi Xiong, Ping Luo, Wenbo Ding
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 24

Verifiable Foundation Models for Robot Safety

arXiv:2606. 23754v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying foundation models for robot control raises a central challenge: the expressive power that enables rich, multimodal perception also makes these models opaque and difficult to analyze formally, rendering them intractable for existing verification tools.

By Davide Corsi, Kyungmin Kim, Roy Fox
arXiv AI
Jun 8

Agentic Physical AI toward a Domain-Specific Foundation Model for Energy Systems: A Case Study on Nuclear Reactor Control

arXiv:2512. 23292v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The prevailing paradigm in AI for physical systems: scaling general-purpose foundation models toward universal multimodal reasoning, confronts a barrier at the control interface.

By Yoon Pyo Lee, Samrendra Roy, Kazuma Kobayashi, Sajedul Talukder, Diab Abueidda, Seid Koric, Souvik Chakraborty, Syed Bahauddin Alam
arXiv AI
Jul 22

SENTINEL: A Multi-Level Formal Framework for Safety Evaluation of Foundation Model-based Embodied Agents

arXiv:2510. 12985v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present SENTINEL, a framework for formally evaluating the physical safety of foundation model (FM)-based embodied agents.

By Simon Sinong Zhan, Philip Wang, Yao Liu, Yiyan Peng, Zinan Wang, Qineng Wang, Zhian Ruan, Xiangyu Shi, Xinyu Cao, Frank Yang, Zhenyang Ni, Kangrui Wang, Ruohan Zhang, Huajie Shao, Manling Li, Qi Zhu
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Benchmarking Vision-Language-Action Models on SO-101: Failure and Recovery Analysis

arXiv:2606. 08881v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization in robotic manipulation, yet existing evaluations are primarily conducted in simulation or on expensive robotic platforms, leaving their robustness on affordable real-world robots largely unexplored.

By Yi Yu, Xinchuan Qiu
arXiv AI
Jul 17

SafeRelBench: A Spatial-Relation-Aware Benchmark for Process-Level Safety in VLM-Driven Embodied Agents

arXiv:2607. 14543v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used as the reasoning backbone of embodied agents, enabling robots to interpret visual scenes, follow language instructions, and plan multi-step actions.

By Huaigang Yang, Ya Li, Min Ren, Bo Dai, Zhenliang Zhang, Zhaofeng He
arXiv AI
Jul 2

Managed Autonomy at Runtime: Gear-Based Safety and Governance for Single- and Multi-Agent Cyber-Physical Systems

arXiv:2607. 00334v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous agents, whether LLM-driven software agents or robotic physical agents, face a common class of failure modes when operating without continuous human oversight: safety violations from unverified actions, behavioral instability from unconstrained loops, and continuity loss from unhandled error states.

By Srini Ramaswamy, Wang Miaosheng
arXiv AI
Sep 2

EmbodiedSkills: A Unified Framework for Orchestrating, Training, and Deploying VLA Agents

EmbodiedSkills is a unified framework that treats each skill decision as an execution proposal, checking prerequisites and verifying outcomes during long‑horizon vision‑language‑action tasks. It connects high‑level skill selection, bounded low‑level VLA execution, and post‑action verification through a fixed executable‑skill interface, enabling easy replacement of low‑level policies and recording of structured trajectories for supervision and adaptation. Instantiated with Qwen3‑VL and OpenPI/pi0.5 on RoboTwin 2.0 and LIBERO, the framework achieves high success rates (86.20% and 97.40% respectively) and demonstrates effective memory‑dependent task performance.

By Wei Wang, Wenqiao Zhang, Yutong Lin, Yuqian Yuan, Tianwei Lin, Jinhao Mao, Zhenxuan Fan, Mingjian Gao, Yang Dai, Wentong Li, Zheqi Lv, Zheng Dong, Yingjie Niu, Jiaqi Zhu, Jun Xiao, Chao Li, Yueting Zhuang
arXiv AI
Sep 7

From Language Models to World-Acting Systems: Progress and Limits of Agentic AI across Digital, Social, Virtual, and Physical Environments

The paper reviews how large language models have evolved into agents that can influence external environments through tool use, interface operation, delegation, state retention, virtual world inhabitation, and robotic control. It critiques the narrative of a single march toward autonomy, distinguishing model competence from system integration, persistence, and safe authority. The authors find that action-interface expansion is well documented, while robust completion, recovery, authorization, and independent verification remain less proven, and they propose a framework of justified delegation to guide future research.

By Linsen Zhu, Mengqing Cai