arXiv AI

SafeRelBench: A Spatial-Relation-Aware Benchmark for Process-Level Safety in VLM-Driven Embodied Agents

arXiv:2607. 14543v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used as the reasoning backbone of embodied agents, enabling robots to interpret visual scenes, follow language instructions, and plan multi-step actions.

arXiv AI
Aug 25

GuardianBench: A Same-Scene Instruction-Contrastive Benchmark for Latent Contextual Risk in Embodied AI

arXiv:2608.21928v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In embodied AI, safety risk can be latent: a benign instruction and a safe scene become hazardous only when composed. Prior work has advanced embodied...

By Zhesheng Zhang, Jiahao Lu, Wei Liu, Cong Pan, Jianhua Yang, Yixiang Chen, Hongyuan Yu, Mengqi Zhang, Kailin Lyu, Zhumin Chen, Keji He
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 12

Can Vision-Language Models Assess Proxemic Risk from Egocentric Robot Images?

Assessing proxemic danger from a robot's egocentric perspective is critical for safe embodied navigation in human environments and requires both visual and contextual reasoning. We evaluate three opensource vision-language models (VLMs) (\textit{InternVL}, \textit{Qwen-VL}, and \textit{SmolVLM}) on the classification of egocentric robot images into four danger levels, comparing three prompting strategies and two rounds of QLoRA fine-tuning against a stratified random baseline.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 20

SafeBranch: Branch-Pair Safety Alignment for Embodied Agents

Vision-language-model-based embodied agents can complete instructed tasks but often violate safety constraints in the process, a problem recently framed as interactive safety. Training such agents to act safely is difficult, since safety and task success are distinct objectives, and safety arises only at a small number of safety-critical steps within a trajectory.

arXiv AI
Jul 22

SENTINEL: A Multi-Level Formal Framework for Safety Evaluation of Foundation Model-based Embodied Agents

arXiv:2510. 12985v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present SENTINEL, a framework for formally evaluating the physical safety of foundation model (FM)-based embodied agents.

By Simon Sinong Zhan, Philip Wang, Yao Liu, Yiyan Peng, Zinan Wang, Qineng Wang, Zhian Ruan, Xiangyu Shi, Xinyu Cao, Frank Yang, Zhenyang Ni, Kangrui Wang, Ruohan Zhang, Huajie Shao, Manling Li, Qi Zhu
arXiv AI
Sep 12

ReactHuman: A Physics-Grounded Benchmark for Human-Like Reactive Decision-Making in Embodied Multimodal LLMs

ReactHuman is a physics‑grounded benchmark that tests whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can make immediate, safety‑critical decisions in simulated humanoid scenarios involving sudden household hazards. The benchmark includes 17 event families, over 1,000 reproducible scenes generated from 240 Hz rigid‑body simulation, and a five‑metric suite evaluating reactions on reasonableness, safety, and physical grounding. Evaluation of seven MLLMs reveals that reactive safety remains unsolved, with models frequently mishandling hazards, relying on appearance over motion, and missing key interception points.

By Yizhan Li, Jianxin You, Mengyang Xiong, Yinhuan Chen, Zicheng Zhao, Dekun Wu, Dongqing Zhang, Bang Liu
arXiv Computer Vision
2d ago

Guide, Think, Act: Interactive Embodied Reasoning in Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper introduces GTA‑VLA, an interactive Vision‑Language‑Action framework that lets users guide robot policies with explicit visual cues such as affordance points, boxes, and traces. Unlike traditional direct sense‑to‑act models, GTA‑VLA incorporates a spatial‑visual Chain‑of‑Thought that blends human guidance with internal task planning, and couples this reasoning module with a lightweight reactive action head for efficient execution. Experiments on the SimplerEnv WidowX benchmark show a state‑of‑the‑art 81.2 % success rate, and the framework significantly improves task success under out‑of‑domain visual shifts and spatial ambiguities, demonstrating the benefit of interactive reasoning for failure recovery in embodied control.

By Yiran Ling, Qing Lian, Jinghang Li, Qing Jiang, Tianming Zhang, Xiaoke Jiang, Chuanxiu Liu, Jie Liu, Lei Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 24

Verifiable Foundation Models for Robot Safety

arXiv:2606. 23754v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying foundation models for robot control raises a central challenge: the expressive power that enables rich, multimodal perception also makes these models opaque and difficult to analyze formally, rendering them intractable for existing verification tools.

By Davide Corsi, Kyungmin Kim, Roy Fox