Adversarial Attacks on Robotic Vision Language Action Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Jones, Eliot Krzysztof, Robey, Alexander, Zou, Andy, Ravichandran, Zachary, Pappas, George J., Hassani, Hamed, Fredrikson, Matt, Kolter, J. Zico
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Jones, Eliot Krzysztof
Robey, Alexander
Zou, Andy
Ravichandran, Zachary
Pappas, George J.
Hassani, Hamed
Fredrikson, Matt
Kolter, J. Zico
author_facet Jones, Eliot Krzysztof
Robey, Alexander
Zou, Andy
Ravichandran, Zachary
Pappas, George J.
Hassani, Hamed
Fredrikson, Matt
Kolter, J. Zico
contents The emergence of vision-language-action models (VLAs) for end-to-end control is reshaping the field of robotics by enabling the fusion of multimodal sensory inputs at the billion-parameter scale. The capabilities of VLAs stem primarily from their architectures, which are often based on frontier large language models (LLMs). However, LLMs are known to be susceptible to adversarial misuse, and given the significant physical risks inherent to robotics, questions remain regarding the extent to which VLAs inherit these vulnerabilities. Motivated by these concerns, in this work we initiate the study of adversarial attacks on VLA-controlled robots. Our main algorithmic contribution is the adaptation and application of LLM jailbreaking attacks to obtain complete control authority over VLAs. We find that textual attacks, which are applied once at the beginning of a rollout, facilitate full reachability of the action space of commonly used VLAs and often persist over longer horizons. This differs significantly from LLM jailbreaking literature, as attacks in the real world do not have to be semantically linked to notions of harm. We make all code available at https://github.com/eliotjones1/robogcg .
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_03350
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adversarial Attacks on Robotic Vision Language Action Models
Jones, Eliot Krzysztof
Robey, Alexander
Zou, Andy
Ravichandran, Zachary
Pappas, George J.
Hassani, Hamed
Fredrikson, Matt
Kolter, J. Zico
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
The emergence of vision-language-action models (VLAs) for end-to-end control is reshaping the field of robotics by enabling the fusion of multimodal sensory inputs at the billion-parameter scale. The capabilities of VLAs stem primarily from their architectures, which are often based on frontier large language models (LLMs). However, LLMs are known to be susceptible to adversarial misuse, and given the significant physical risks inherent to robotics, questions remain regarding the extent to which VLAs inherit these vulnerabilities. Motivated by these concerns, in this work we initiate the study of adversarial attacks on VLA-controlled robots. Our main algorithmic contribution is the adaptation and application of LLM jailbreaking attacks to obtain complete control authority over VLAs. We find that textual attacks, which are applied once at the beginning of a rollout, facilitate full reachability of the action space of commonly used VLAs and often persist over longer horizons. This differs significantly from LLM jailbreaking literature, as attacks in the real world do not have to be semantically linked to notions of harm. We make all code available at https://github.com/eliotjones1/robogcg .
title Adversarial Attacks on Robotic Vision Language Action Models
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03350