Jun 2026· International Conference on Control and Intelligent Robotics· pp. 194-198· 0 citations· 14 references
Abstract
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for embodied intelligence by unifying perception, language grounding, and action generation in an end-to-end framework. Despite their strong performance, their deployment in physical control loops introduces new security risks: small perturbations to visual inputs can propagate through sequential decision-making and ultimately lead to unsafe or task-failing robot behaviors. In this work, we investigate the vulnerability of VLA models to black-box adversarial patch attacks and propose a patch generation method that explicitly targets closed-loop policy behavior. Our approach combines a rollout-aware objective with an occlusion-calibrated scoring mechanism, enabling the attack to capture trajectory-level degradation while separating genuine adversarial effects from trivial performance drops caused by visual occlusion. We evaluate our method on OpenVLA with the LIBERO benchmark. Experimental results show that our attack consistently degrades task performance, reducing the success rate on LIBERO-Spatial from 81.0% to 74.4% and on LIBERO-Object from 70.4% to 53.0%. These findings highlight the security risks of VLA systems in embodied settings and underscore the need for robustness evaluation and defense mechanisms for safe real-world deployment.
Despite progress in Embodied AI, Vision-and-Language Navigation systems remain vulnerable to adversarial visual disturbances. Most existing methods rely on white-box access to target model gradients, which is often unrealistic for real-world deployed systems and computationally exhaustive due to recursive backpropagation for optimization, limiting their applicability. While previous black-box methods predominantly target single-step, instantaneous decision tasks, they struggle to handle the task complexities and temporal dependencies. This highlights the need for a gradient-free attack method that can effectively disrupt the multistep sequential perception-action loop using only observable inputs and outputs. Therefore, we propose AdvNav, a behavior-guided black-box adversarial attack framework that disturbs an agent's first-person views during navigation. To construct an informative surrogate objective for effective optimization guidance in gradient-free search under the black-box setting, we design a dual-granularity behavior-based feedback, aggregating a trajectory-level performance score representing overall navigation degradation, an action-level reward score considering the potential decision risk, and a deviation indicator, all of which are extracted from the agent's self-output behaviors. This feedback guides a hybrid optimization strategy that heuristically tunes perturbation strength via adaptive updates and evolves noise spatial structure genetically, to iteratively discover the most disruptive noise configuration. Evaluated against Transformer-based HAMT and LLM-based MapGPT with two types of backbones on R2R dataset, AdvNav achieves 49.70/65.96/87.30% Attack Success Rate. The result demonstrates the effectiveness and generality of AdvNav, reveals critical perception vulnerabilities and offers insights for the design of future resilient VLN models.
Chenyang Li, Kaige Li, Zeyu Jiang et al.· 0 citations
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for general-purpose robot manipulation; however, their transition to real-world environments reveals vulnerabilities to minor environmental perturbations. We propose FLARE, an optimized physical spotlight attack framework that exploits these vulnerabilities via targeted illuminations, dropping baseline task success rates to zero without any access to model internals. While adversarial training is the standard countermeasure, we identify a critical and previously underestimated defensive pitfall: naive data augmentations incorrectly condition VLA models to discard color as noise, collapsing their visual perception into a purely shape-biased processor. We expose this degradation through a diagnostic grayscale evaluation, in which the defended model maintains high success rates on grayscale inputs, while its success rate on benign, color-dependent real-world tasks drops to at most 47.5%, well below the undefended baseline. To address this, we propose ChromaGuard, a chroma-preserving adversarial training method. On a physical 6-DoF robotic platform, we demonstrate that ChromaGuard achieves 97.5% and 92.5% success rates in benign and attacked color-dependent tasks, respectively.
To efficiently generate adversarial examples, a gradient-based attack method is proposed that performs optimization exclusively on the vision encoder of the VLM rather than on the entire multimodal architecture, which significantly reduces the computational cost and resource requirements of the attack while maintaining strong effectiveness.
Ilan Zini, B. Addad, Katarzyna Kapusta· 0 citations
Flow-matching vision-language-action (VLA) models such as pi0 generate robot actions by integrating a learned denoising velocity field, and have been reported to resist adversarial perturbations that readily fool autoregressive VLAs. We show that this robustness is largely illusory: it stems from prior attacks ignoring the multi-step denoising ODE. We introduce DRIFT (Denoising Redirection via Input perturbation of the Flow-matching Trajectory), a test-time universal adversarial patch placed on the robot's gripper that attacks the denoising velocity field of an off-the-shelf policy. Our central finding is counterintuitive: attacking only the first denoising step is both stronger and cheaper than attacking a wider window of steps, which we explain through a gradient conflict unique to input-space optimization and which is exactly opposite to the training-time backdoor regime. On pi0 and pi0.5 across four LIBERO suites, DRIFT breaks essentially all originally-solvable tasks with a small single patch, far exceeding action- and embedding-space attack baselines.
Deploying Vision-Language-Action (VLA) robots as mobile edge nodes within wireless sensor networks (WSNs) requires robust protection against physical adversarial threats. We present VLAGuard, a framework to assess and mitigate a critical vulnerability: policy-critical action-to-vision attention hijacking. We first introduce a stress-test module, Visuomotor Attention-guided Semantic Attack (VASA), using printable patches to severely distract the robot's action-conditioned cross-attention. To counter this, we propose Attention-Protective Fine-Tuning (APFT), a defense that stabilizes spatiotemporal attention and enforces geometric consistency with zero inference overhead. Evaluations across simulated and physical WSN-assisted smart environments demonstrate significant robustness gains. APFT reduces the OpenVLA failure rate from 100.0% to 25.9% in LIBERO simulations. Furthermore, across 2,000 real-world trials, APFT improves the average success rate from 23.0% to 67.4% under severe patch attacks. This highlights that protecting attention pathways is important for improving the robustness of VLA-driven edge nodes in sensor networks.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as generalist robotic policies capable of following diverse language instructions and performing a wide range of manipulation tasks. However, their direct control over embodied agents also exposes them to adversarial interference that may cause unsafe physical behaviors. Existing attacks on robotic policies are typically optimized for a single task or instruction, leaving the cross-task vulnerabilities of multitask VLAs largely unexplored. We introduce UniTexture, a cross-task universal adversarial texture attack that uses a single textured 3D object to induce targeted deviations in VLA action predictions across multiple tasks. UniTexture backpropagates gradients from the policy's action outputs to surface texture parameters through a differentiable renderer. It jointly optimizes the shared texture over a distribution of tasks, instructions, states, and viewpoints using a targeted action-space objective, steering predicted actions toward attacker-defined targets without optimizing a separate texture for each task. We evaluate UniTexture on OpenVLA and $\pi_{0.5}$ across diverse manipulation tasks and multiple evaluation settings. UniTexture reduces the mean task success rate from 90.0% under benign conditions to 48.4% under attack, induces target-aligned action shifts, and further exhibits cross-suite and cross-model transfer without re-optimization. Together, these findings reveal shared cross-task vulnerabilities in multitask VLAs that can be systematically exploited through a single adversarial surface texture.
Yukun Dai, Mingzhe Dai, Tianshi Wang et al.· 0 citations