arXiv AI

SilentDrift: Exploiting Action Chunking for Stealthy Backdoor Attacks on Vision-Language-Action Models

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 Computer Vision
Aug 28

TrapVLA: Trapping Vision-Language-Action Models in Configured Failure Modes

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 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