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arXiv Robotics — research abstracts· Michal P. Podolinsky, Yunhao Yang, Daniel Little, Hong Lu, Rohan Siva, Olin Goudey, Neel P. Bhatt, Matthias Scheutz, Ufuk Topcu·· 4 days agoSignalEditorial score75

Failure Prediction and Classification in Vision-Language-Action Models Via Calibrated Latent Probing

Failure Prediction and Classification in Vision-Language-Action Models Via Calibrated Latent Probing

Summary

This paper introduces VLA-Tug, a lightweight probe for detecting and classifying failures in Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) under distribution shifts. The method improves early failure detection by up to 30% at matched false-positive rates compared to learned baselines and maintains valid bounds on missed-detection and false-alarm rates in up to 86% of runs under unseen tasks, versus 21% for baselines. VLA-Tug also predicts failure modes with up to 44% higher top-3 accuracy on unseen tasks, enabling corrective actions. The authors release a dataset of 3,180 annotated manipulation episodes to support future research.

Editorial context

The authors present VLA-Tug, a lightweight latent probing method for failure prediction in Vision-Language-Action models, reporting up to 30% improvement in early failure detection and 44% increase in top-3 failure mode accuracy on unseen tasks based on experiments described in the abstract.

Source: arXiv Robotics — research abstracts · Read original article ↗

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What the source reports

Publisher-reported claims, with original evidence. These results have not been independently verified by RoboSignal.

Reported numbers

  • annotated manipulation episodes

    3,180

    View original evidence
    ve probe supports lightweight steering that improves task success. We release a dataset of 3,180 annotated manipulation episodes to support future work on latent failure detection in VLAs at https://vla-tug.github.io.
    Open source S5
  • Reported accuracy

    ≤44%

    Reported trials

    View original evidence
    he strongest learned baseline. Under shift to unseen tasks, the bounds on missed-detection and false-alarm rates remain valid in up to 86% of runs, versus at most 21% for baselines. Unlike existing methods, VLA-Tug predicts the failure mode to enable corrective actions, raising top-3 accuracy on unseen tasks by up to 44% over a majority baseline. VLA-Tug enables real-time monitoring where the well-timed and informati
    Open source S4

What remains unknown

Not established in the collected evidence: Environment, Control, Data origin.

Reported performance applies to the described task. It does not establish general autonomy or deployment readiness.

Source excerpts and review record

Automatically extracted; no manual editorial approval recorded.

ve probe supports lightweight steering that improves task success. We release a dataset of 3,180 annotated manipulation episodes to support future work on latent failure detection in VLAs at https://vla-tug.github.io.

Open source S5

he strongest learned baseline. Under shift to unseen tasks, the bounds on missed-detection and false-alarm rates remain valid in up to 86% of runs, versus at most 21% for baselines. Unlike existing methods, VLA-Tug predicts the failure mode to enable corrective actions, raising top-3 accuracy on unseen tasks by up to 44% over a majority baseline. VLA-Tug enables real-time monitoring where the well-timed and informati

Open source S4

edge. Existing methods fail to fulfill these requirements. We present VLA-Tug, a lightweight probe over the latent layers of a VLA backbone that improves early failure detection and bounds the missed-detection and false-alarm rates, with minimal inference overhead. We show that supervising on the pre-failure segment of a trajectory increases early failure detection at matched false-positive rates by up to 30% over t

Open source S3

Failure Prediction and Classification in Vision-Language-Action Models Via Calibrated Latent Probing

Open source S1

arXiv:2611.08425v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) enable general-purpose embodied intelligence, but their performance is brittle under distribution shift, where unanticipated failures can damage equipment or endanger people. Deploying VLAs in real-world systems therefore requires a runtime monitor that is timely, calibrated, and informative while being efficient enough to run on the

Open source S2

Source:arXiv Robotics — research abstracts · arxiv.org

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