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.
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 BAS‑VLA, a task‑semantic action calibration framework for vision‑language‑action models that addresses two failure modes: unnecessary action drift under appearance changes and insufficient behavioral change under semantic alterations. BAS‑VLA uses a breaking‑centered calibration core and a selective evidence‑gated preserving auxiliary to maintain performance on clean and semantics‑preserving conditions while suppressing stale‑task behavior. Experiments on OpenPI‑pi0.5 and LIBERO‑Object Milk‑Swap show high success rates on clean and preserved tasks, a dramatic drop under target‑object swaps, and improved robustness to style shifts from 42% to 70% without harming clean performance.
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:2608. 13438v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contact-rich manipulation failures are often detected only after the robot has committed to contact.
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.
ProTracer is a training‑free framework that uses Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) together with proprioceptive signals to analyze robot manipulation failures. It performs binary failure detection, categorization, explanation generation, and introduces failure onset localization—identifying the earliest moment a robot deviates from a valid trajectory leading to failure. The method leverages proprioceptive dynamics to pinpoint informative action boundaries and converts robot‑state signals into natural‑language descriptions for joint multimodal reasoning, achieving strong performance on both conventional failure diagnosis and the new failure onset localization task.
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.
The paper introduces FailBank, a four‑stage self‑evolving framework that transforms runtime feedback from safety shields into lasting policy improvements for vision‑language‑action (VLA) models. By using a counterfactual correction teacher, outcome‑aware admission, and guarded LoRA updates, FailBank converts useful shield proposals into corrective targets while preserving successful actions as anchors. Experiments on the VLA‑Arena benchmark show that FailBank boosts task success rates by up to 8.5 percentage points and reduces cumulative policy cost by up to 35.6%, outperforming both base policies and traditional runtime shielding.
arXiv:2608.22419v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Query-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer low-latency inference that is attractive for bimanual robotic manipulation, but we observe that...
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.
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...