arXiv Machine Learning

Towards General Language-Conditioned Latent Safety Filters

arXiv:2608. 00315v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robot policies are becoming increasingly general, with vision-language-action (VLA) models enabling a single policy to execute diverse tasks specified in natural language.

arXiv AI
Sep 25

CrossSafe: Towards Cross-Embodiment Latent Safety Filters

CrossSafe proposes embodiment-conditioned safety filtering that uses a Hamilton‑Jacobi reachability value function shared across robots while conditioning on each robot’s morphology and kinematics via a morphology‑aware latent representation. The method performs reachability analysis directly in latent space, enabling a single policy trained on multiple bimanual robot embodiments and manipulation tasks to generalize zero‑shot to a held‑out embodiment and reduce collision rates. Experiments on five embodiments and five tasks demonstrate that training with more embodiments improves generalization.

By Ihab Tabbara, Yuxuan Yang, Hussein Sibai
arXiv AI
Sep 12

ActSafeGuard: Differentiable and Training-Aligned Constraint Enforcement for Flow-Matching Policies

arXiv:2609. 11697v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) and World-Action Models (WAMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in general-purpose robotic manipulation, yet their generated actions may violate hard physical constraints and therefore be unsafe or infeasible for deployment.

By Jianming Ma, Rongjun Jin, Xiaxi Si, Yang Zhang, Yiheng Li, Yue Gao
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
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
3d ago

Learning from Runtime Feedback through Failure-Bank Self-Evolution for Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper introduces FailBank, a four‑stage self‑evolving framework that transforms runtime feedback from safety shields into lasting policy improvements for vision‑language‑action (VLA) models. By using a counterfactual correction teacher, outcome‑aware admission, and guarded LoRA updates, FailBank converts useful shield proposals into corrective targets while preserving successful actions as anchors. Experiments on the VLA‑Arena benchmark show that FailBank boosts task success rates by up to 8.5 percentage points and reduces cumulative policy cost by up to 35.6%, outperforming both base policies and traditional runtime shielding.

By Mingyue Cui, Zheyuan Liu, Yihan Zhu, Zheyuan Zhang, Meng Jiang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

Learning What to Say to Your VLA: Mostly Harmless Vision Language Action Model Steering

arXiv:2606. 12299v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide a natural language interface to robot control, but the mapping from language to behavior is often brittle and unintuitive: semantically similar instructions can induce drastically different behaviors, while some capabilities may not be elicitable through prompting alone.

By Hyun Joe Jeong, Gokul Swamy, Andrea Bajcsy