VLA architectures exhibit architecture-specific failure signatures at the motor-command level, with direction reversal as a universal predictor and velocity monitoring ineffective for continuous models.
Unpacking failure modes of generative policies: Runtime monitoring of consistency and progress
8 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
8
Pith papers citing it
abstract
Robot behavior policies trained via imitation learning are prone to failure under conditions that deviate from their training data. Thus, algorithms that monitor learned policies at test time and provide early warnings of failure are necessary to facilitate scalable deployment. We propose Sentinel, a runtime monitoring framework that splits the detection of failures into two complementary categories: 1) Erratic failures, which we detect using statistical measures of temporal action consistency, and 2) task progression failures, where we use Vision Language Models (VLMs) to detect when the policy confidently and consistently takes actions that do not solve the task. Our approach has two key strengths. First, because learned policies exhibit diverse failure modes, combining complementary detectors leads to significantly higher accuracy at failure detection. Second, using a statistical temporal action consistency measure ensures that we quickly detect when multimodal, generative policies exhibit erratic behavior at negligible computational cost. In contrast, we only use VLMs to detect failure modes that are less time-sensitive. We demonstrate our approach in the context of diffusion policies trained on robotic mobile manipulation domains in both simulation and the real world. By unifying temporal consistency detection and VLM runtime monitoring, Sentinel detects 18% more failures than using either of the two detectors alone and significantly outperforms baselines, thus highlighting the importance of assigning specialized detectors to complementary categories of failure. Qualitative results are made available at https://sites.google.com/stanford.edu/sentinel.
representative citing papers
Tri-Info uses three information theory signals on action diversity, temporal consistency, and state coupling to predict VLA model failures with cross-domain generalization to 83% real-world accuracy.
Perturbation of hidden activations yields a label-free uncertainty signal that improves failure detection under distribution shift in VLA models on LIBERO benchmarks compared to sampling-based baselines.
AEGIS uses activation probes for early-warning detection of high-risk steps in weak policies and selectively escalates to stronger policies, recovering 10.1% of lost trajectories on LIBERO-Spatial while activating the strong policy on only 38% of steps.
A deep RL vulnerability-prediction policy trained in semantic embedding space finds up to 23% more unique robot manipulation failures than vision-language baselines and enables more efficient fine-tuning.
Expecting over scoring-token logits yields continuous, scalable verification that improves agent trajectory selection and dense RL rewards across coding, robotics, and medical benchmarks.
GTP-FA is a grasp-then-plan framework with failure attribution that diagnoses errors to optimize grasping priors and planning data collection, raising success rates across RL, IL, diffusion, and VLA methods in simulation and real robots.
citing papers explorer
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How VLAs Fail Differently: Black-Box Action Monitoring Reveals Architecture-Specific Failure Signatures
VLA architectures exhibit architecture-specific failure signatures at the motor-command level, with direction reversal as a universal predictor and velocity monitoring ineffective for continuous models.
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Tri-Info: Generalizable, Interpretable Failure Prediction for VLA Models via Information Theory
Tri-Info uses three information theory signals on action diversity, temporal consistency, and state coupling to predict VLA model failures with cross-domain generalization to 83% real-world accuracy.
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Perturbation-Based Uncertainty for Failure Detection in Vision-Language-Action Models
Perturbation of hidden activations yields a label-free uncertainty signal that improves failure detection under distribution shift in VLA models on LIBERO benchmarks compared to sampling-based baselines.
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AEGIS: A Backup Reflex for Physical AI
AEGIS uses activation probes for early-warning detection of high-risk steps in weak policies and selectively escalates to stronger policies, recovering 10.1% of lost trajectories on LIBERO-Spatial while activating the strong policy on only 38% of steps.
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RoboMD: Uncovering Robot Vulnerabilities through Semantic Potential Fields
A deep RL vulnerability-prediction policy trained in semantic embedding space finds up to 23% more unique robot manipulation failures than vision-language baselines and enables more efficient fine-tuning.
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LLM-as-a-Verifier: A General-Purpose Verification Framework
Expecting over scoring-token logits yields continuous, scalable verification that improves agent trajectory selection and dense RL rewards across coding, robotics, and medical benchmarks.
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Grasp-Then-Plan with Failure Attribution: A Closed Two-Stage Framework for Precise and Generalizable Robotic Manipulation
GTP-FA is a grasp-then-plan framework with failure attribution that diagnoses errors to optimize grasping priors and planning data collection, raising success rates across RL, IL, diffusion, and VLA methods in simulation and real robots.
- VLAConf: Calibrated Task-Success Confidence for Vision-Language-Action Models