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Main Authors: Majumdar, Anirudha, Sharma, Mohit, Kalashnikov, Dmitry, Singh, Sumeet, Sermanet, Pierre, Sindhwani, Vikas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06575
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author Majumdar, Anirudha
Sharma, Mohit
Kalashnikov, Dmitry
Singh, Sumeet
Sermanet, Pierre
Sindhwani, Vikas
author_facet Majumdar, Anirudha
Sharma, Mohit
Kalashnikov, Dmitry
Singh, Sumeet
Sermanet, Pierre
Sindhwani, Vikas
contents Visuomotor policies trained via imitation learning are capable of performing challenging manipulation tasks, but are often extremely brittle to lighting, visual distractors, and object locations. These vulnerabilities can depend unpredictably on the specifics of training, and are challenging to expose without time-consuming and expensive hardware evaluations. We propose the problem of predictive red teaming: discovering vulnerabilities of a policy with respect to environmental factors, and predicting the corresponding performance degradation without hardware evaluations in off-nominal scenarios. In order to achieve this, we develop RoboART: an automated red teaming (ART) pipeline that (1) modifies nominal observations using generative image editing to vary different environmental factors, and (2) predicts performance under each variation using a policy-specific anomaly detector executed on edited observations. Experiments across 500+ hardware trials in twelve off-nominal conditions for visuomotor diffusion policies demonstrate that RoboART predicts performance degradation with high accuracy (less than 0.19 average difference between predicted and real success rates). We also demonstrate how predictive red teaming enables targeted data collection: fine-tuning with data collected under conditions predicted to be adverse boosts baseline performance by 2-7x.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_06575
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Predictive Red Teaming: Breaking Policies Without Breaking Robots
Majumdar, Anirudha
Sharma, Mohit
Kalashnikov, Dmitry
Singh, Sumeet
Sermanet, Pierre
Sindhwani, Vikas
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Systems and Control
Visuomotor policies trained via imitation learning are capable of performing challenging manipulation tasks, but are often extremely brittle to lighting, visual distractors, and object locations. These vulnerabilities can depend unpredictably on the specifics of training, and are challenging to expose without time-consuming and expensive hardware evaluations. We propose the problem of predictive red teaming: discovering vulnerabilities of a policy with respect to environmental factors, and predicting the corresponding performance degradation without hardware evaluations in off-nominal scenarios. In order to achieve this, we develop RoboART: an automated red teaming (ART) pipeline that (1) modifies nominal observations using generative image editing to vary different environmental factors, and (2) predicts performance under each variation using a policy-specific anomaly detector executed on edited observations. Experiments across 500+ hardware trials in twelve off-nominal conditions for visuomotor diffusion policies demonstrate that RoboART predicts performance degradation with high accuracy (less than 0.19 average difference between predicted and real success rates). We also demonstrate how predictive red teaming enables targeted data collection: fine-tuning with data collected under conditions predicted to be adverse boosts baseline performance by 2-7x.
title Predictive Red Teaming: Breaking Policies Without Breaking Robots
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06575