arXiv AI

VLA-Scope: Shift-Aware Failure Prediction for Vision-Language-Action Models

VLA-Scope is a two‑stage framework designed to predict failures in vision‑language‑action models under distribution shifts. The first stage detects out‑of‑distribution inputs and classifies their shift categories using pooled image and language representations. For OOD inputs, the second stage updates failure risk during execution by combining shift category, action‑prefix features, and execution progress, achieving a ROC‑AUC of 0.8497 after 60 actions and outperforming baseline methods.

arXiv Computer Vision

Sep 7

FailureSpot: Label-Efficient Timestamp-Level Failure Detection for Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper introduces FailureSpot, a label‑efficient method for detecting failures at the timestamp level in vision‑language‑action (VLA) policies. It first generates weak supervision from unlabeled VLA action chunks by identifying abnormal patterns, then employs active learning to annotate only the most uncertain trajectories. Experiments on multiple VLA policies demonstrate improved performance for both timestamp‑level and trajectory‑level failure detection.

By Jie Ma, Zongxi Liu, Yi Zhu

robotics fine-tuning multimodal

arXiv AI

Jun 30

Early Warning Signals for OpenVLA Failure under Visual Distribution Shift

arXiv:2606. 29699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision Language Action models combine perception, language grounding, and control in a single policy, but their failures are hard to diagnose once visual conditions shift.

By Dipesh Tharu Mahato, Rachel Ren

robotics benchmarks

arXiv AI

Sep 1

Training-Free Action Correction for VLA Model Failures via Language Feedback

arXiv:2608.29967v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models demonstrate strong semantic understanding yet exhibit systematic failures during deployment. The conditions under...

By Owen Kwon, Pablo Ortega-Kral, Arthur Bucker, Jean Oh

robotics multimodal

arXiv AI

Sep 4

FailBench: How Reliable are VLMs at Judging Robot Task Success?

FailBench is a new benchmark for robot failure detection, containing 2,197 manipulation attempts from 14 public sources, with 75% of failures occurring naturally. The study evaluates 13 vision‑language model (VLM) detectors, finding the best model achieves only 0.77 mean balanced accuracy, and that fine‑tuned failure detectors often underperform general‑purpose VLMs. Performance varies with visual evidence, excelling when object motion is observable but dropping to near chance on contact‑intensive assembly tasks, and input‑level cropping of outcome‑relevant regions improves the top detector by 2.4 percentage points.

By Zaruhi Navasardyan, Tatul Danielyan, Hrant Davtyan

llms robotics fine-tuning multimodal benchmarks safety

arXiv AI

Jul 3

Restoring Linguistic Grounding in VLA Models via Train-Free Attention Recalibration

arXiv:2603. 06001v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable robots to perform manipulation tasks directly from natural language instructions and are increasingly viewed as a foundation for generalist robotic policies.

By Ninghao Zhang, Bin Zhu, Shijie Zhou, Jingjing Chen

robotics multimodal benchmarks safety

arXiv Machine Learning

1d ago

Beyond Appearance Shifts: Task-Semantic Action Calibration for VLA Models

The paper introduces BAS‑VLA, a task‑semantic action calibration framework for vision‑language‑action models that addresses two failure modes: unnecessary action drift under appearance changes and insufficient behavioral change under semantic alterations. BAS‑VLA uses a breaking‑centered calibration core and a selective evidence‑gated preserving auxiliary to maintain performance on clean and semantics‑preserving conditions while suppressing stale‑task behavior. Experiments on OpenPI‑pi0.5 and LIBERO‑Object Milk‑Swap show high success rates on clean and preserved tasks, a dramatic drop under target‑object swaps, and improved robustness to style shifts from 42% to 70% without harming clean performance.

By Shuaijun Liu, Feiyang You, Chengyu Wu, Shuyang Hao, Chenglong Zhang, Jingyao Cai, Xingwei Chen, Ningxin Su

robotics multimodal benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jun 9

ActProbe: Action-Space Probe for Early Failure Detection of Generative Robot Policies

arXiv:2606. 08508v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative robot policies fail unpredictably at deployment: they hesitate at critical moments, drift off-task, or commit to unrecoverable actions.

By Bingjia Huang, Xiangyu Li, Xiang Wang, Liang Mi, Zixu Hao, Weijun Wang, Hao Wu, Kun Li, Yunxin Liu, Ting Cao

reinforcement-learning robotics fine-tuning benchmarks

arXiv AI

Aug 18

OODBench: Out-of-Distribution Benchmark for Large Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2602. 18094v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing Visual-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved significant progress by being trained on massive-scale datasets, typically under the assumption that data are independent and identically distributed (IID).

By Ling Lin, Yang Bai, Heng Su, Congcong Zhu, Yaoxing Wang, Yang Zhou, Huazhu Fu, Jingrun Chen

llms agents robotics multimodal benchmarks safety

arXiv Computer Vision

Aug 25

Guardian: Detecting Robotic Planning and Execution Errors with Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2512.01946v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robust robotic manipulation requires reliable failure detection and recovery. Although recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show promise in r...

By Paul Pacaud, Ricardo Garcia, Shizhe Chen, Cordelia Schmid

llms robotics multimodal benchmarks

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

llms robotics fine-tuning multimodal

arXiv AI

Jun 30

RoboGaze: Evaluating Robot World Models via Structured Vision-Language Analysis

arXiv:2606. 28385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in robot world models enable synthetic video generation for embodied prediction and planning.

By Minh-Loi Nguyen, Nghiem Tuong Diep, Hung Khang Nguyen, Minh Le, Doanh Le Thien, Hoang H. Tran, Dung D. Le, Vu N. Duong, Daniel Sonntag, An Thai Le, Duy Minh Ho Nguyen, Vien Anh Ngo, Tran Van Nhiem

llms agents diffusion robotics multimodal benchmarks safety

arXiv AI

Sep 7

RoboSPA: Can VLA Models Go Beyond Simple Scenes and Short-Horizon Tasks?

RoboSPA is a large-scale robotic manipulation dataset and benchmark designed to evaluate Vision‑Language‑Action models on fine‑grained spatial reasoning and long‑horizon procedural planning. It contains 10 task categories, 56 base tasks, and 280 variants across five difficulty levels, with 527K trajectories collected from multiple embodiments and scenes. The benchmark introduces diagnostic metrics beyond binary success, revealing that current VLA models struggle with complex spatial relations, precise execution, and memory‑intensive planning.

By Zhenxuan Fan, Bo Zhang, Yutong Lin, Yuqian Yuan, Juekai Lin, Liang Liang, Zhuoyi Huang, Wenqiao Zhang, Juncheng Li, Siliang Tang, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang

agents robotics multimodal benchmarks

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