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
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
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:2606. 09630v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies provide strong priors for language-conditioned manipulation, but remain brittle in off-nominal states requiring targeted recovery.
By Haodi Hu, Chung-Ta Huang, Jing Liu, Ye Wang, Kei Suzuki, Matthew Brand, Toshiaki Koike-Akino
arXiv:2608. 03231v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies promise general robotic manipulation, but their robustness against physical-world attacks remains fragile.
By Jinquan Zhang, Dongfu Yin, Run Yang, Yufeng Yan, Zhen Tian, F. Richard Yu
arXiv:2606. 27755v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable instruction-driven robotic manipulation, but they inherit oversized language backbones from pretrained VLMs whose capacity far exceeds what is needed for short robotic instructions.
By Guoheng Sun, Kaixi Feng, Shwai He, Xiaochuan Gong, Yexiao He, Ziyao Wang, Zheyu Shen, Wanghao Ye, Ramana Rao Kompella, Gaowen Liu, Ang Li
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: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
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have attracted growing interest as a scalable approach to robotic manipulation. While these models are effective action predictors, deploying them as robotic agents exposes critical gaps: no mechanism for failure recovery, inconsistent execution over long horizons, and limited robustness to shifts in observations, tasks, or embodiments.
Embodied Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically obtained by fine-tuning powerful pretrained VLMs on robotics data, yet it is unclear how much commonsense and factual knowledge they retain after adaptation. Failures on knowledge-sensitive tasks are ambiguous, conflating missing knowledge with poor generalization of low-level control.
arXiv:2606. 19297v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically obtained by fine-tuning powerful pretrained VLMs on robotics data, yet it is unclear how much commonsense and factual knowledge they retain after adaptation.
By Nikita Kachaev, Andrey Moskalenko, Matvey Skripkin, Nikita Kurlaev, Daria Pugacheva, Albina Burlova, Mikhail Kolosov, Denis Shepelev, Andrey Kuznetsov, Elena Tutubalina, Aleksandr I. Panov, Alexey K. Kovalev, Vlad Shakhuro
arXiv:2607. 08974v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action models (VLAs) inherit semantic capabilities from pretrained VLMs, yet large-scale post-training on robot data and architectural modifications can reshape the backbone so extensively that it becomes difficult to isolate what the VLM contributes to control.
By Yuri Ishitoya, Jeremy Siburian, Masashi Hamaya, Kuniaki Saito, Cristian C. Beltran-Hernandez, Mai Nishimura