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
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
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
arXiv:2606. 03134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Imitation-learning policies for robot manipulation inherit the quality of the success labels attached to their training episodes, and those labels are usually produced by the robot's own success check.
By Aarav Bedi (University of California, Berkeley)
The paper introduces Configured Failure Trapping, a new backdoor attack targeting Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models that activates through subtle textual triggers and forces the robot to fail in a specific, controlled manner. It presents a data engine for generating high‑quality target trajectories, an automated evaluation suite, and two benchmarks—Trap‑LIBERO and Trap‑RoboTwin—covering four failure modes. The authors propose TrapVLA, a method that learns trigger‑induced action residuals to steer policies toward the desired failure behavior, demonstrating effectiveness in both simulation and real‑world robotic experiments while maintaining performance on clean data.
By Jun-Hui Liu, Kun-Yu Lin, Yi-Lin Wei, Xu-Han Chen, Yinghao Li, Zhuohao Li, Yuan-Ming Li, Qing Zhang, Xiaoyi Fan, Dongmei Jiang, Yan Li, Wei-Shi Zheng
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:2603. 15600v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurate process supervision remains a critical challenge for long-horizon robotic manipulation.
By Yibin Liu, Yaxing Lyu, Daqi Gao, Zhixuan Liang, Weiliang Tang, Shilong Mu, Xiaokang Yang, Yao Mu
arXiv:2604. 08168v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models have advanced robot manipulation through large-scale pretraining, but real-world deployment remains challenging due to partial observability and delayed feedback.
By Jindi Lv, Hao Li, Jie Li, Fankun Kong, Yang Wang, Pengfei Yi, Yifei Nie, Xiaofeng Wang, Zheng Zhu, Chaojun Ni, Qiuping Deng, Hengtao Li, Jiancheng Lv, Guan Huang
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
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.
By Kaiwen Zhu, Dongfang Liu, Liangkai Liu
AntiGrounding is a visual action-selection framework that turns short robot trajectories into both executable motion plans and rendered prompts for vision‑language model evaluation. After filtering for feasibility, each trajectory is scored on safety, task alignment, efficiency, and physical plausibility using structured multi‑view visual question answering, and the best trajectories are refined and validated by a digital twin before real‑world execution. In eight real‑world manipulation tasks, the system achieved a 71.25% success rate with a single GPT‑6 Astra evaluator, outperforming baseline methods.
By Wenbo Li, Yiteng Chen, Wenhao Li, Qingyao Wu
The paper introduces ROBORMBENCH, a benchmark comprising 2,390 real‑robot trajectories, 21,673 verified paraphrases, and ground‑truth progress labels, to evaluate paraphrase robustness in vision‑language reward models (VLMs). It demonstrates that current VLMs often give different rewards for semantically equivalent goal descriptions, sometimes flipping a robot’s outcome from failure to success. The study finds that this instability is widespread, worsens with more divergent rewrites, and is not mitigated by model scale or explicit reasoning, though dedicated reward models trained with trajectory‑grounded supervision show greater stability.
By Wonje Jeung, Sangyeon Yoon, Hyesoo Hong, Yoonjun Cho, Dongjae Jeon, Bumjun Kim, Jean Oh, Youngjae Yu, Albert No