arXiv AI By Yukiya Horiba, Koshiro Aoki, Shunsuke Yasuki, Bum Jun Kim, Taiki Miyanishi

Detect and Suppress: A Mechanistic Defense against Adversarial Patches in VLA Models

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The paper presents a mechanistic defense for Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models against adversarial patches. By using a sparse autoencoder, the authors identify a feature whose activation correlates strongly with the presence of an adversarial patch and suppress this feature only when a linear probe detects an attack. This conditional intervention improves robustness on the LIBERO‑10 benchmark while avoiding the performance degradation that occurs with continuous suppression.

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