arXiv AI By Christian A. Rogers, Qian Lin, Daniel S. Brown

Do VLAs Know They Will Fail? Interpretable Success and Failure Patterns in Physical AI Systems

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The paper investigates Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models used as robot policies, showing that sparse autoencoder (SAE) representations of OpenVLA activations can predict task failure before an unrecoverable state is reached. It identifies specific SAE features whose strong activations correlate with stages of success or failure, and maps these to recurring behavioral patterns by locating temporal intervals of significant activation change. A VLM‑based interpretation pipeline is then developed to generate behavioral descriptions of these patterns, with validation on held‑out intervals.

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