提出无需额外训练的不确定性检测方法,可实时识别生成动作的可靠性。
The Geometry of Flow-Matching Uncertainty: A Cost-free Uncertainty Proxy and Its Application in Flow-based VLA Failure Detection

- 基于速度场几何特性,用轨迹弯曲度衡量生成不确定性。
- 单次前向传播即可计算,比传统方法快且准确率更高。
- 适合对安全性要求高的机器人控制场景,部署成本极低。
流匹配(Flow Matching, FM)已成为现代具身模型中常用的动作头范式。然而作为条件生成模型,它不显式暴露内在不确定性,可能导致在误判场景或遇到分布外输入时生成错误动作。因此,判断FM生成动作是否可信对安全部署至关重要。现有不确定性估计方法在实时控制中存在额外训练开销、高计算成本和泛化能力差等问题。本文从速度场的几何角度揭示:不确定性表现为对理想仿射各向同性收缩场的偏离。基于此,我们提出去噪加速度(denoising acceleration, $\mathrm{accel}$),一种无需额外模型评估、训练或重采样的高泛化性、零成本不确定性代理指标,仅通过一次前向传播即可测量去噪轨迹的弯曲程度。理论与实证均表明,$\mathrm{accel}$ 是FM不确定性的忠实代理,并在在线故障检测中验证其有效性。结果表明,$\mathrm{accel}$ 能在任务终止前及时识别失败轨迹,在真实部署预算下表现优于或媲美昂贵的重采样与训练基线。代码与演示见:https://github.com/rrrrrrzy/fm-geometry。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Flow matching (FM) has become a popular action head paradigm for modern embodied models. However, as a conditional generative model, it does not explicitly expose its inherent uncertainty, producing faulty action chunks even when it misinterprets the scene or encounters out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs. Therefore, determining when an FM-generated action can be trusted is essential for safe deployment, yet existing uncertainty estimation methods on real-time control suffer from several issues: extra training budget, high computational overhead, and low generalization ability. In this work, we provide a geometric interpretation of FM uncertainty in the velocity field, showing that uncertainty manifests as deviation from an ideal affine-isotropic contraction field. Building on this observation, we introduce denoising acceleration ($\mathrm{accel}$), a highly-generalizable and cost-free uncertainty proxy that measures the bending of the denoising trajectory from a single forward pass, without additional model evaluations, training, or resampling. We theoretically and empirically demonstrate that $\mathrm{accel}$ is a faithful proxy for FM uncertainty and further test its utility in online failure detection. Results show that $\mathrm{accel}$ identifies failing rollouts well before termination, matching or even outperforming costly resampling- and training-based baselines across settings under realistic deployment budget. Code and demos available at: https://github.com/rrrrrrzy/fm-geometry.
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