Vision-Language-Action Safety: Threats, Challenges, Evaluations, and Mechanisms

About this episode

This episode discusses the safety challenges and evaluations related to Vision-Language-Action models in embodied intelligence.

🤗 Upvotes: 42 | cs.RO Authors: Qi Li, Bo Yin, Weiqi Huang, Ruhao Liu, Bojun Zou, Runpeng Yu, Jingwen Ye, Weihao Yu, Xinchao Wang Title: Vision-Language-Action Safety: Threats, Challenges, Evaluations, and Mechanisms Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.23775v1 Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are emerging as a unified substrate for embodied intelligence. This shift raises a new class of safety challenges, stemming from the embodied nature of VLA systems, including irreversible physical consequences, a multimodal attack surface across vision, language, and state, real-time latency constraints on defense, error propagation over long-horizon trajectories, and vulnerabilities in the data supply chain. Yet the literature remains fragmented across robotic learning, adversarial machine learning, AI alignment, and autonomous systems safety. This survey provides a unified and up-to-date overview of safety in Vision-Language-Action models. We organize the field along two parallel timing axes, attack timing (training-time vs. inference-time and defense timing (training-time vs. inference-time, linking each class of threat to the stage at which it can be mitigated. We first define…

People in this episode

Hosts: Jingwen Liang, Gengyu Wang

Topics covered

• Vision-Language-Action
• safety challenges
• embodied intelligence
• adversarial machine learning
• autonomous systems safety

Keywords

• VLA models
• safety
• multimodal attack surface
• error propagation
• data supply chain

More episodes of Daily Paper Cast

• EvoArena: Tracking Memory Evolution for Robust LLM Agents in Dynamic Environments · June 13, 2026 · 24 min
• MiniMax Sparse Attention · June 13, 2026 · 26 min
• SpatialClaw: Rethinking Action Interface for Agentic Spatial Reasoning · June 13, 2026 · 23 min
• InterleaveThinker: Reinforcing Agentic Interleaved Generation · June 13, 2026 · 21 min
• FORT-Searcher: Synthesizing Shortcut-Resistant Search Tasks for Training Deep Search Agents · June 13, 2026 · 23 min
• Robust-U1: Can MLLMs Self-Recover Corrupted Visual Content for Robust Understanding? · June 13, 2026 · 20 min