Abstract
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated promising generalization capabilities across robotic manipulation tasks, yet their real-world deployment remains limited by the lack of effective safety measures. Specifically, existing safety measures only prevent collisions caused by the robot's next action. In this paper, we propose a neuro-symbolic safety guidance mechanism for flow matching based VLAs that enables predictive collision avoidance. Flow matching based VLAs determine the next actions by predicting a trajectory (a sequence of actions) through an iterative neural flow matching process. Our method formulates safety enforcement as a minimum-norm constrained optimization problem that corrects safety violations during the denoising process of noisy intermediate trajectory predictions. By analyzing predicted trajectories and applying corrections during iterative denoising, our approach anticipates collisions before they become unavoidable. This interleaving of symbolic constraint satisfaction with neural trajectory generation enables predictive collision avoidance rather than reactive intervention. On the SafeLIBERO benchmark, our method achieves 82.8% collision avoidance and 81.6% task success, a 6.3% and 19.8% improvement respectively over single-step methods, with the largest gains on long-horizon tasks where compounding distribution shift is most pronounced. Video demonstrations of our approach are included on our project page at https://willenglish.tech/SafetyGuidedFlowMatching/.
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Jun 22, 2026cs.RO
Despite the impressive manipulation capabilities of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, their operational safety under strict constraints remains largely unverified. To address this, we introduce a parametric safety benchmark to procedurally generate safety-critical scenarios with comprehensive stochasticity. To overcome the scalability bottlenecks of human teleoperation, we develop a novel keypose-driven data generation pipeline. Leveraging this infrastructure, we curate a large-scale dataset of 19,664 strictly collision-free demonstrations with extensive domain randomization. We then conduct a systematic cross-paradigm evaluation of eight VLA and two embodied foundation models. Our analysis reveals a critical generalization-safety tension: although high-diversity training fosters safer trajectories, task success remains fundamentally bottlenecked by sub-optimal trajectory synthesis and semantic misalignment. By providing a scalable pipeline, a robust dataset, and profound failure-mode insights, LIBERO-Safety establishes a crucial foundation for developing safe and reliable VLA models.
Rongxu Cui, Zongzheng Zhang, Jingrui Pang +11
Dec 9, 2025cs.RO
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generalizing across diverse robotic manipulation tasks. However, deploying these models in unstructured environments remains challenging due to the critical need for simultaneous task compliance and safety assurance, particularly in preventing potential collisions during physical interactions. In this work, we introduce a Vision-Language-Safe Action (VLSA) architecture, named AEGIS, which contains a plug-and-play safety constraint (SC) layer formulated via control barrier functions. AEGIS integrates directly with existing VLA models to improve safety with theoretical guarantees, while maintaining their original instruction-following performance. To evaluate the efficacy of our architecture, we construct a comprehensive safety-critical benchmark SafeLIBERO, spanning distinct manipulation scenarios characterized by varying degrees of spatial complexity and obstacle intervention. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, AEGIS achieves over 50% improvement in obstacle avoidance rate while substantially increasing the task success rate by nearly 10%. All benchmark datasets, code, and supplementary materials are publicly available at https://vlsa-aegis.github.io/.
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Sep 22, 2026cs.RO
Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models are promising for general-purpose manipulation, but long-horizon execution remains fragile. Small state-estimation or control errors can lead to irreversible failures (e.g., collisions and object drops). Avoiding these risks requires a proactive safety mechanism capable of anticipating hazards. In this paper, we introduce SafeLoop, a non-invasive external wrapper that adds hazard prediction and rollback-based recovery to a VLA model without changing its parameters. SafeLoop trains a risk predictor from vision and proprioception to output four values: the probability and time-to-hazard for body collisions and for object failures. A lightweight controller then chooses one of three actions based on the predicted risk: continue execution (noop), save a safety checkpoint (record), or retreat in joint space (rollback). Rollback moves the robot back to a recent safe waypoint and queries the base policy again, which may yield an alternative continuation. Across 24 LIBERO tasks (16 random seeds each) and three real-robot tasks (25 rollouts each), SafeLoop achieves a stronger overall safety-success trade-off than alternative methods, reducing hazard cases by roughly 70% while preserving task success and the base-policy control rate. Project code is available at https://github.com/Loule0-0/SafeLoop/tree/release/safeloop.
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