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
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
VLA-FAIL introduces a lightweight framework for detecting failures in vision-language-action models used in robotic manipulation. It combines two novel detectors: the first-layer Mahalanobis distance (LLMD) identifies out-of-distribution states by comparing token-wise deviations in last-layer features to training data, while the second, action chunk consistency (ACC), detects failures by spotting inconsistencies between consecutive action chunks in receding-horizon control. The authors also propose a threshold‑independent metric, “AUCPDT,” to evaluate detection accuracy and latency, and show through real‑world and simulation experiments that LLMD and ACC together provide reliable and early failure detection, outperforming more expensive baseline methods.
By Florian Seligmann, Emiliyan Gospodinov, Enes Ulas Dincer, Gerhard Neumann
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)
arXiv:2609.35575v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: The real-world performance of current vision-language-action models is fundamentally constrained by the limited coverage of expert demonstrat...
By Zhuoyuan Yu, Jiacheng Wang, Tianle Liu, Yihua Ren, Peng Yu, Chen Bai, Ziheng Zhang, Yufei Jia, Jindou Jia, Yuhang Zhang, Xinrui Zhang, Shang Yujing, Yuxiang Chen, Chuhao Zhou, Tiancai Wang, Jianfei Yang
The paper introduces VLA‑Tug, a lightweight probe that monitors latent layers of Vision‑Language‑Action models to detect failures early and predict failure modes. By supervising on pre‑failure segments, it improves early detection by up to 30% at matched false‑positive rates and maintains valid missed‑detection and false‑alarm bounds in 86% of runs under unseen task shifts, outperforming existing baselines. The method also raises top‑3 accuracy on unseen tasks by up to 44% and supports real‑time, edge‑efficient monitoring for safer deployment.
By Michal P. Podolinsky, Yunhao Yang, Daniel Little, Hong Lu, Rohan Siva, Olin Goudey, Neel P. Bhatt, Matthias Scheutz, Ufuk Topcu
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:2609.39145v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Unreliable visual inputs can harm task performance and cause potential physical safety risks for vision-language-action (VLA) models. We analyze how...
By Heejae Suh, Jongwook Han, Zahra Gholami, Yohan Jo
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