arXiv:2608. 05715v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as planners in robotic systems, where they translate natural-language commands into executable actions grounded in visual scene understanding.
arXiv:2607. 04146v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work establishes that trigger-word data poisoning of vision language action models is practical, while at the same time the open-source robotics ecosystem holds trust assumptions about community contributions.
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.
The paper proposes a lightweight foothold prediction model (FPM) that anticipates future foot placements using only proprioception and velocity commands, allowing the robot to sample elevation maps only around predicted footholds. This preprocessing reduces redundant sensory input, enabling the locomotion policy to learn faster—reaching a given terrain difficulty in about one‑third the training iterations compared to using the full elevation map. The resulting policy outperforms both full‑map and attention‑based encoders on sparse foothold scenarios, and it zero‑shot transfers to a Unitree G1 humanoid across diverse indoor and outdoor obstacles.
arXiv:2601. 14323v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly deployed in safety-critical robotic applications, yet their security vulnerabilities remain underexplored.
arXiv:2601. 04266v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are widely deployed in safety-critical embodied AI applications such as robotics.
GigaBrain-WBC-0.5 is a Behavior World Model that uses a causal Transformer to predict next actions, states, and a distribution over latent behavior commands for humanoid whole-body control. It incorporates an automatic terrain-annotation pipeline to recover 3D contact geometry from motion data, allowing the model to learn how terrain and objects influence dynamics. The system detects implausible commands online, retracts them onto learned behaviors, and achieves high success rates in terrain interaction, command robustness, and fall recovery, with promising hardware trials on different robots.
arXiv:2508. 08521v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly being used in a broad range of applications, bringing their security and behavioral control to the forefront.
The paper introduces the Environment State-Text Injection (ESTI) attack, a novel method that manipulates the textual representation of environment states in large language model‑driven embodied agents without altering user instructions, model parameters, or executors. ESTI re‑frames adversarial goals as false state evidence that aligns with the current environment, thereby influencing both planning and execution through object properties, spatial relations, affordances, task‑stage rules, and execution feedback. The authors also present ESTI‑Bench, a benchmark that evaluates attack propagation across the planning‑to‑execution closed loop, and demonstrate that ESTI outperforms existing baselines on multiple embodied task datasets, achieving up to 89.32% higher planning‑level and 43.69% higher execution‑level attack success rates.
arXiv:2607. 29169v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies achieve strong performance in robotic manipulation but remain vulnerable to runtime disturbances that break the temporal alignment among visual observations, robot states, and executed actions.
FWBC‑VLA is a force‑aware framework that links vision‑language‑action (VLA) models with whole‑body compensation control for wheeled‑legged robots. It introduces HSR‑Force, a sensorless residual‑torque estimator that infers contact strength and encodes this information as tokens for the VLA action decoder, allowing the policy to detect contact onset, loading, and release. The system fine‑tunes a pretrained VLA backbone on a large WL&Arm dataset, combines proprioceptive, Jacobian‑derived force, and contact estimates to generate corrective actions, and demonstrates effectiveness in real‑world tasks such as whiteboard wiping and door opening.
arXiv:2605.31196v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safe human--robot collaboration requires more than visual description: a monitor must determine whether the robot body is safely separated, a...