arXiv:2608.29967v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models demonstrate strong semantic understanding yet exhibit systematic failures during deployment. The conditions under...
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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 07595v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language agents increasingly consume screenshots, documents, and user interfaces before writing to memory, sending messages, or invoking external tools.
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.
arXiv:2605.17204v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies translate language and visual inputs into robot actions, where their hidden representations directly sh...
RePO‑VLA is a recovery‑driven policy optimization framework for Vision‑Language‑Action models that separates success, recovery, and failure trajectories. It introduces Recovery‑Aware Initialization, a Progress‑Aware Semantic Value Function, and Value‑Conditioned Refinement to learn from both successful and failed rollouts, enabling the policy to prefer high‑progress actions without online failure detectors. The authors also present the Failure‑Recovery Benchmark (FRBench) and demonstrate that RePO‑VLA raises adversarial success rates from 20% to 75% on average in simulated and real‑world bimanual tasks.
arXiv:2608.07742v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Visual-language models (VLMs) frequently struggle with robustness issues in real-world situations due to low- or varying-quality input images. In t...
The paper evaluates five vision‑language models on autonomous driving tasks under various visual input conditions, finding that visual corruption affects accuracy and confidence differently across models and datasets. It then tests Visual Evidence Augmentation (VEA) as an inference‑time technique to enhance reliability, observing mixed improvements depending on the model and setting.
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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 11889v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used for scene understanding in autonomous driving, but robustness analysis often relies on task-agnostic embedding stability alone.