Exploiting Vulnerabilities: Universal Adversarial Attacks on Vision-Language-Action Models in Robotics

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong capabilities in controlling robots across diverse manipulation tasks. However, their adversarial robustness remains largely underexplored, and exploiting this weakness can lead to physical-world harm. Existing attacks on VLA models often rely on pixel-space perturbations or white-box access, resulting in noticeable artifacts and limited deployability in real-world robotic systems. In this work, we propose DURA, a diffusion-based unrestricted robotic attack that generates visually natural adversarial patches for VLA models. DURA supports both white-box and black-box attack settings, where the black-box setting requires only the predicted actions of the victim model. By optimizing along the latent trajectory of a pretrained diffusion model, DURA generates visually natural patches while steering the robot toward attacker-specified target actions. Extensive experiments in both simulation and the real physical world show that DURA consistently outperforms existing methods. Our findings expose a safety risk for physically deployed VLA models and call for stronger defenses.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models are gaining attention in robotics, yet their robustness to adversarial attacks remains largely unexplored. Existing work shows that adversarial patches can mislead VLA-based robots but assumes full access to the entire execution trajectory, an unrealistic requirement in practice. We address this limitation by formulating a partially observable threat model, where the adversary can exploit only a short prefix of the trajectory to generate a fixed patch applied to all subsequent frames. Under this setting, we propose a two-phase framework. First, we localize the patch using the model's attention maps to identify visually critical regions that correspond to the full instruction. Then, we optimize the patch to disrupt the semantic grounding of target objects and increase the curvature of action trajectories, thereby compounding failures in both perception and control. Extensive experiments in simulation and real-world robotic environments show that our method sustains adversarial effects under partial observability, inducing long-horizon disruptions and significantly reducing task success rates.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as generalist robotic policies capable of following diverse language instructions and performing a wide range of manipulation tasks. However, their direct control over embodied agents also exposes them to adversarial interference that may cause unsafe physical behaviors. Existing attacks on robotic policies are typically optimized for a single task or instruction, leaving the cross-task vulnerabilities of multitask VLAs largely unexplored. We introduce UniTexture, a cross-task universal adversarial texture attack that uses a single textured 3D object to induce targeted deviations in VLA action predictions across multiple tasks. UniTexture backpropagates gradients from the policy's action outputs to surface texture parameters through a differentiable renderer. It jointly optimizes the shared texture over a distribution of tasks, instructions, states, and viewpoints using a targeted action-space objective, steering predicted actions toward attacker-defined targets without optimizing a separate texture for each task. We evaluate UniTexture on OpenVLA and $π_{0.5}$ across diverse manipulation tasks and multiple evaluation settings. UniTexture reduces the mean task success rate from 90.0% under benign conditions to 48.4% under attack, induces target-aligned action shifts, and further exhibits cross-suite and cross-model transfer without re-optimization. Together, these findings reveal shared cross-task vulnerabilities in multitask VLAs that can be systematically exploited through a single adversarial surface texture.