研究发现,机器人推理过程中的物体名称错误会大幅降低任务成功率。
Altered Thoughts, Altered Actions: Probing Chain-of-Thought Vulnerabilities in VLA Robotic Manipulation
- 通过替换推理文本中的物体名称来测试模型脆弱性
- 物体名称替换导致成功率下降最高达45个百分点
- 仅依赖内部推理链的模型存在隐蔽攻击风险
近期视觉-语言-动作(VLA)模型越来越多采用思维链(CoT)推理,在生成动作指令前先输出自然语言计划。这一推理模块与动作解码器之间的内部文本通道尚未受到对抗性检验。我们探究:动作解码器究竟依赖该中间计划的哪些属性?仅对推理过程进行针对性破坏(输入保持不变)是否会影响机器人的物理任务表现?设计涵盖七种文本扰动的分类体系,分为三类攻击层级(盲目噪声、机械语义、LLM自适应),应用于最先进的推理型VLA模型,在40个LIBERO桌面上操作任务上进行测试。结果揭示显著不对称性:替换推理文本中的物体名称使整体成功率下降8.3~19.3个百分点(目标条件任务)至45个百分点(单个任务),而句子重排、空间方向反转、词元噪声,甚至70B参数大模型生成的合理但错误计划均影响甚微(±4个百分点以内)。这表明动作解码器依赖实体引用的准确性,而非推理质量或顺序结构。值得注意的是,高级LLM攻击者效果反而不如简单的机械式物体名替换,因保持合理性的同时无意保留了解码器所需的实体锚定结构。跨架构对照实验表明,此脆弱性仅存在于带推理的模型中;指令级攻击则同时影响两类模型,证实内部推理链是输入验证防御无法察觉的独特且隐蔽的威胁向量。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models increasingly adopt chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, generating a natural-language plan before decoding motor commands. This internal text channel between the reasoning module and the action decoder has received no adversarial scrutiny. We ask: which properties of this intermediate plan does the action decoder actually rely on, and can targeted corruption of the reasoning trace alone -- with all inputs left intact -- degrade a robot's physical task performance? We design a taxonomy of seven text corruptions organized into three attacker tiers (blind noise, mechanical-semantic, and LLM-adaptive) and apply them to a state-of-the-art reasoning VLA across 40 LIBERO tabletop manipulation tasks. Our results reveal a striking asymmetry: substituting object names in the reasoning trace reduces overall success rate by 8.3~percentage points (pp) -- reaching $-$19.3~pp on goal-conditioned tasks and $-$45~pp on individual tasks -- whereas sentence reordering, spatial-direction reversal, token noise, and even a 70B-parameter LLM crafting plausible-but-wrong plans all have negligible impact (within $\pm$4~pp). This asymmetry indicates that the action decoder depends on entity-reference integrity rather than reasoning quality or sequential structure. Notably, a sophisticated LLM-based attacker underperforms simple mechanical object-name substitution, because preserving plausibility inadvertently retains the entity-grounding structure the decoder needs. A cross-architecture control using a non-reasoning VLA confirms the vulnerability is exclusive to reasoning-augmented models, while instruction-level attacks degrade both architectures -- establishing that the internal reasoning trace is a distinct and stealthy threat vector invisible to input-validation defenses.
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