Early Warning Signals for OpenVLA Failure under Visual Distribution Shift
Visual shifts can cause a vision-language-action policy to fail after initially plausible behavior. We ask whether OpenVLA's internal activations contain signals associated with the steps before failure. We freeze the policy, record one MLP activation per LIBERO-10 step, and fit two linear monitors. Occlusion reduces task success from $57\%$ to $17\%$. Within failed matched-reset trajectories, a layer-16 logistic probe attains AUROC $0.972$ and AUPRC $0.352$, whereas action disagreement attains AUROC $0.496$. Without refitting, the occlusion-trained probe reaches AUROC $0.689$ on failed camera-jitter episodes. In a calibration check, however, the same layer-16 monitor averages 3.32 warnin...
| Authors | Dipesh Tharu Mahato, Rachel Ren |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 29 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 August 2026 |
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