arXiv AI

CARD: Diagnosing Belief to Action Routing Failures in Vision Language Models

The paper introduces CARD, a diagnostic tool that steers activations along one mental-state axis while measuring predictions on another, to investigate how vision‑language models use internal representations of beliefs, knowledge, and intentions. Using CARD on open‑weight VLMs evaluated on the Relay Chain cooperative grid‑world benchmark, the authors uncover a routing failure: models do not incorporate belief representations into their next action predictions, leaving partner information unused.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

What do VLM-Based Vision-Language Navigation Models Rely on: Interpreting and Steering Policy Behavior

arXiv:2609.24576v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) models rely mostly on pre-trained large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to predict navigation actions. While th...

By D\'ebora Oliveira Makowski, Samiran Gode, Abhijeet Nayak, Marco Hutter, Cordelia Schmid, Lukas Rosenberger Schmid, Wolfram Burgard
arXiv AI
Jun 19

Tri-Info: Generalizable, Interpretable Failure Prediction for VLA Models via Information Theory

arXiv:2606. 19998v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly deployed across diverse tasks, yet they remain black boxes whose physical interactions can cause irreversible harm, making generalizable and interpretable failure detection essential.

By Jinghan Yang, Yunchao Zhang, Wang Yuan, Haolun Wan, Jiaming Zhang, Zhengyang Hu, Yanchao Yang
arXiv AI
Sep 1

VLA-Trace: Diagnosing Vision-Language-Action Models through Representation and Behavior Tracing

arXiv:2605.30117v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding how Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models transform multimodal knowledge into embodied control remains an open challenge. We present VL...

By Haoyuan Shi, Xiancong Ren, Yingji Zhang, Qinfan Zhang, Jiayu Hu, Haozhe Shan, Han Dong, Jinpeng Lu, Yinda Chen, Yi Zhang, Yong Dai, Xiaozhu Ju
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 13

LLM Router: Rethinking Routing with Prefill Activations

arXiv:2603. 20895v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing routers rely on semantic query features or handcrafted features, which often fail to capture model-specific failures or intrinsic task difficulty.

By Tanay Varshney, Annie Surla, Michelle Xu, Gomathy Venkata Krishnan, Maximilian Jeblick, David Austin, Neal Vaidya, Davide Onofrio
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

VeriFuse: Bounded Vision-Language Arbitration and Reason-Guided Refinement for Cooperative 3D Perception

VeriFuse is a bounded arbitration framework that integrates vision‑language models (VLMs) into vehicle‑infrastructure cooperative 3D perception. Each agent first generates independent detections, then VeriFuse creates a unified candidate pool of geometric proposals and cross‑source hypotheses. A frozen VLM selects among three actions—SELECT, REFINE, or REJECT—to resolve ambiguity and produce final 3D detections, achieving strong AP50/AP70 scores on the DAIR‑V2X dataset while keeping vehicle‑side BEV AP50 drop minimal under delay.

By Hongyi Lin, Yiyao Liu, Qi Kang, Heye Huang, Yang Liu, Haris Koutsopoulos, Jinhua Zhao
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Hide-and-Seek in Trajectories: Discovering Failure Signals for VLA Runtime Monitoring

The paper introduces Hide-and-Seek, a framework for detecting failures in Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models during robot execution. It treats failure detection as a coarsely supervised learning problem, using inter‑trajectory and intra‑trajectory contrastive objectives to localize failure‑indicative actions without step‑level annotations. Experiments on LIBERO, VLABench, and a real‑world robotic platform show that Hide‑and‑Seek achieves state‑of‑the‑art multi‑task failure detection performance across several VLA policies.

By Seongheon Park, Wendi Li, Changdae Oh, Samuel Yeh, Zsolt Kira, Michael Hagenow, Sharon Li