Geometric Red-Teaming for Robotic Manipulation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Goel, Divyam, Wang, Yufei, Wu, Tiancheng, Qiao, Guixiu, Piliptchak, Pavel, Held, David, Erickson, Zackory
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Goel, Divyam
Wang, Yufei
Wu, Tiancheng
Qiao, Guixiu
Piliptchak, Pavel
Held, David
Erickson, Zackory
author_facet Goel, Divyam
Wang, Yufei
Wu, Tiancheng
Qiao, Guixiu
Piliptchak, Pavel
Held, David
Erickson, Zackory
contents Standard evaluation protocols in robotic manipulation typically assess policy performance over curated, in-distribution test sets, offering limited insight into how systems fail under plausible variation. We introduce Geometric Red-Teaming (GRT), a red-teaming framework that probes robustness through object-centric geometric perturbations, automatically generating CrashShapes -- structurally valid, user-constrained mesh deformations that trigger catastrophic failures in pre-trained manipulation policies. The method integrates a Jacobian field-based deformation model with a gradient-free, simulator-in-the-loop optimization strategy. Across insertion, articulation, and grasping tasks, GRT consistently discovers deformations that collapse policy performance, revealing brittle failure modes missed by static benchmarks. By combining task-level policy rollouts with constraint-aware shape exploration, we aim to build a general purpose framework for structured, object-centric robustness evaluation in robotic manipulation. We additionally show that fine-tuning on individual CrashShapes, a process we refer to as blue-teaming, improves task success by up to 60 percentage points on those shapes, while preserving performance on the original object, demonstrating the utility of red-teamed geometries for targeted policy refinement. Finally, we validate both red-teaming and blue-teaming results with a real robotic arm, observing that simulated CrashShapes reduce task success from 90% to as low as 22.5%, and that blue-teaming recovers performance to up to 90% on the corresponding real-world geometry -- closely matching simulation outcomes. Videos and code can be found on our project website: https://georedteam.github.io/ .
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_12379
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Geometric Red-Teaming for Robotic Manipulation
Goel, Divyam
Wang, Yufei
Wu, Tiancheng
Qiao, Guixiu
Piliptchak, Pavel
Held, David
Erickson, Zackory
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Standard evaluation protocols in robotic manipulation typically assess policy performance over curated, in-distribution test sets, offering limited insight into how systems fail under plausible variation. We introduce Geometric Red-Teaming (GRT), a red-teaming framework that probes robustness through object-centric geometric perturbations, automatically generating CrashShapes -- structurally valid, user-constrained mesh deformations that trigger catastrophic failures in pre-trained manipulation policies. The method integrates a Jacobian field-based deformation model with a gradient-free, simulator-in-the-loop optimization strategy. Across insertion, articulation, and grasping tasks, GRT consistently discovers deformations that collapse policy performance, revealing brittle failure modes missed by static benchmarks. By combining task-level policy rollouts with constraint-aware shape exploration, we aim to build a general purpose framework for structured, object-centric robustness evaluation in robotic manipulation. We additionally show that fine-tuning on individual CrashShapes, a process we refer to as blue-teaming, improves task success by up to 60 percentage points on those shapes, while preserving performance on the original object, demonstrating the utility of red-teamed geometries for targeted policy refinement. Finally, we validate both red-teaming and blue-teaming results with a real robotic arm, observing that simulated CrashShapes reduce task success from 90% to as low as 22.5%, and that blue-teaming recovers performance to up to 90% on the corresponding real-world geometry -- closely matching simulation outcomes. Videos and code can be found on our project website: https://georedteam.github.io/ .
title Geometric Red-Teaming for Robotic Manipulation
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12379