Zonghuan Xu

With the growing deployment of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in real-world embodied AI systems, their increasing vulnerability to backdoor attacks poses a serious safety threat. A backdoored VLA agent can be covertly triggered by a pre-injected backdoor to execute adversarial actions, potentially causing system failures or even physical harm. Although backdoor attacks on VLA models have been explored, prior work has focused only on untargeted attacks, leaving the more practically threatening scenario of targeted manipulation unexamined. In this paper, we study targeted backdoor attacks on VLA models and introduce TabVLA, a novel framework that enables such attacks via black-box fine-tuning. TabVLA explores two deployment-relevant inference-time threat models: input-stream editing and in-scene triggering. It formulates poisoned data generation as an optimization problem to improve attack effectivess. Experiments with OpenVLA-7B on the LIBERO benchmark reveal that the vision channel is the principal attack surface: targeted backdoors succeed with minimal poisoning, remain robust across variations in trigger design, and are degraded only by positional mismatches between fine-tuning and inference triggers. We also investigate a potential detection-based defense against TabVLA, which reconstructs latent visual triggers from the input stream to flag activation-conditioned backdoor samples. Our work highlights the vulnerability of VLA models to targeted backdoor manipulation and underscores the need for more advanced defenses.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable robots to interpret natural-language instructions and perform diverse tasks, yet their integration of perception, language, and control introduces new safety vulnerabilities. Despite growing interest in attacking such models, the effectiveness of existing techniques remains unclear due to the absence of a unified evaluation framework. One major issue is that differences in action tokenizers across VLA architectures hinder reproducibility and fair comparison. More importantly, most existing attacks have not been validated in real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose AttackVLA, a unified framework that aligns with the VLA development lifecycle, covering data construction, model training, and inference. Within this framework, we implement a broad suite of attacks, including all existing attacks targeting VLAs and multiple adapted attacks originally developed for vision-language models, and evaluate them in both simulation and real-world settings. Our analysis of existing attacks reveals a critical gap: current methods tend to induce untargeted failures or static action states, leaving targeted attacks that drive VLAs to perform precise long-horizon action sequences largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce BackdoorVLA, a targeted backdoor attack that compels a VLA to execute an attacker-specified long-horizon action sequence whenever a trigger is present. We evaluate BackdoorVLA in both simulated benchmarks and real-world robotic settings, achieving an average targeted success rate of 58.4% and reaching 100% on selected tasks. Our work provides a standardized framework for evaluating VLA vulnerabilities and demonstrates the potential for precise adversarial manipulation, motivating further research on securing VLA-based embodied systems.