Skip to content

Detect and Suppress: A Mechanistic Defense against Adversarial Patches in VLA Models

Oct 2026 · 0 citations · 29 references
Computer Science

Abstract

Adversarial patches can disrupt Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models by manipulating visual observations, leading to failures in robot control. However, it remains poorly understood which internal mechanisms underlie these failures and how targeted interventions can mitigate them. In this work, we mechanistically analyze VLA representations using a sparse autoencoder (SAE) and identify a feature whose activation strongly correlates with the presence of an adversarial patch. Based on this analysis, we suppress the identified feature at inference time only when a linear probe detects an attack. This intervention improves robustness without the cost of fine-tuning the VLA. We evaluate our method against VLA adversarial patch attacks on LIBERO-10. Conditional intervention improves success rate under intermittent attacks, whereas continuously applying the same intervention substantially degrades policy performance. These results show that attack-related internal representations can provide useful targets for VLA adversarial defense and that controlling when to intervene is important for limiting disruption to nominal policy behavior.

View source

Similar papers

#artificial intelligence Open access May 2023

Evaluating the Performance of Large Language Models on GAOKAO Benchmark

GAOKAO-Bench is introduced, an intuitive benchmark that employs questions from the Chinese GAOKAO examination as test samples, including both subjective and objective questions that contribute a robust evaluation benchmark for future large language models and offers valuable insights into the advantages and limitations...

Xiaotian Zhang, Chun-yan Li, Yi Zong et al. · 216 citations · ⚡17
#artificial intelligence Open access Jul 2024

Gender, Race, and Intersectional Bias in Resume Screening via Language Model Retrieval

This work investigates the possibilities of using LLMs in a resume screening setting via a document retrieval framework that simulates job candidate selection and finds that the MTEs are biased, significantly favoring White-associated names in 85% of cases and female-associated names in only 11.1% of cases.

Kyra Wilson, Aylin Caliskan · 131 citations · ⚡8
#artificial intelligence Review Oct 2025

Ultralytics YOLO Evolution: An Overview of YOLO26, YOLO11, YOLOv8 and YOLOv5 Object Detectors for Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the Ultralytics YOLO family, emphasizing architectural evolution, benchmarking, deployment, and emerging directions from YOLOv5 through YOLO27, and examines detection, segmentation, depth, classification, pose, oriented detection, tracking, export, quantization, and deplo...

Ranjan Sapkota, Manoj Karkee · 112 citations · ⚡10

BadRAG: Identifying Vulnerabilities in Retrieval Augmented Generation of Large Language Models

A novel threat is unveiled in which attackers steer the RAG system's response by injecting malicious passages into its knowledge base, enabling the attacker to steer the response without altering the user input or modifying the RAG weights.

Jiaqi Xue, Meng Zheng, Yebowen Hu et al. · 109 citations · ⚡8

The Death of Schema Linking? Text-to-SQL in the Age of Well-Reasoned Language Models

This work revisits schema linking when using the latest generation of large language models (LLMs) and finds empirically that newer models are adept at utilizing relevant schema elements during generation even in the presence of large numbers of irrelevant ones.

Karime Maamari, Fadhil Abubaker, Daniel Jaroslawicz et al. · 109 citations · ⚡19

PRISM: Self-Pruning Intrinsic Selection Method for Training-Free Multimodal Data Selection

Empirically, PRISM reduces the end-to-end time for data selection and model tuning to just 30% of conventional pipelines, and achieves this efficiency while simultaneously enhancing performance, surpassing models fine-tuned on the full dataset across eight multimodal and three language understanding benchmarks.

Jinhe Bi, Yifan Wang, Danqi Yan et al. · 73 citations · ⚡4

Related blog posts

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.