StepTrigger: Contact-State-Triggered Backdoor Attacks on VLM-Powered Legged Robots
Large language models and vision-language models are increasingly used as high-level planners in robotic systems, using task goals and sensor summaries to select navigation or manipulation actions. This creates a new backdoor surface: a compromised planner can behave normally in most runs, yet change its target selection when a hidden trigger is present. Prior attacks on LLM-powered or embodied agents mainly rely on triggers that appear in language, camera-visible objects, scene semantics, or specific sequences of past actions. This paper presents StepTrigger, a contact-state-triggered backdoor attack for VLM-powered legged robots. The trigger is not a prompt token or a visible marker. It...
| Authors | Jiageng Zhang, Doniyorkhon Obidov, Kaichen Yang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.RO |
| Published | 7 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 August 2026 |
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