Exploring the Adversarial Vulnerabilities of Vision-Language-Action Models in Robotics

Abstract: Recently in robotics, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a transformative approach, enabling robots to execute complex tasks by integrating visual and linguistic inputs within an end-to-end learning framework. While VLA models offer significant capabilities, they also introduce new attack surfaces, making them vulnerable to adversarial attacks. With these vulnerabilities largely unexplored, this paper systematically quantifies the robustness of VLA-based robotic systems. Recognizing the unique demands of robotic execution, our attack objectives target the inherent spatial and functional characteristics of robotic systems. In particular, we introduce an untargeted position-aware attack objective that leverages spatial foundations to destabilize robotic actions, and a targeted attack objective that manipulates the robotic trajectory. Additionally, we design an adversarial patch generation approach that places a small, colorful patch within the camera's view, effectively executing the attack in both digital and physical environments. Our evaluation reveals a marked degradation in task success rates, with up to a 100\% reduction across a suite of simulated robotic tasks, highlighting critical security gaps in current VLA architectures. By unveiling these vulnerabilities and proposing actionable evaluation metrics, this work advances both the understanding and enhancement of safety for VLA-based robotic systems, underscoring the necessity for developing robust defense strategies prior to physical-world deployments.