Robotics paper index

SAFECAST: Robust Failure Detection for VLA Policies with Contrast-Set Training and Calibration

2026-08-04 · arXiv: 2608.04246

One-line summary

A robotics research paper on SAFECAST: Robust Failure Detection for VLA Policies with Contrast-Set Training and Calibration.

Engineering notes

Engineering notes will be added by the Robot Papers editorial team.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充:本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Vision-language-action policies often fail under deployment-time distribution shifts such as clutter, distractor objects, lighting changes, novel objects, altered initial states, and reworded instructions. Hidden-state-based risk probes combined with functional conformal prediction can detect rollout failures, but their reliability depends on calibration data matching deployment conditions. We introduce SAFECAST, which leverages contrast set perturbations to improve hidden-state probe training and calibration for deployment time shift. SAFECAST statistically significantly improves failure detection ROC-AUC scores over a state of the art baseline in both real-world DROID and LIBERO simulation experiments across multiple VLM backbones. We further find that SAFECAST benefits most when both visual and language contrast set perturbations are used to augment data, and that with contrast set perturbations, sim-to-real calibration leads to better probes than using real rollout data only.

5.0Engineering value
7.0Research novelty
4.0Business relevance

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