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Bit-Flip Attacks on Vision-Language-Action Models: Action-Decoding Architecture Shapes the Vulnerability

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TL;DR - This paper presents the first bit-flip attack on quantized vision-language-action models, showing that a few targeted INT8 weight faults can reduce robotic task success to 0%. Vulnerability varies substantially with action-decoding architecture, making weight integrity critical for embodied AI security.

  • Gradient-selected flips are highly effective, while hundreds of random flips are harmless.
  • Direct-regression and token-policy heads fail after 1–5 flips; evaluated flow-matching policies require roughly 100–300.
  • Damaging bits cluster in a small number of action-generating layers, enabling targeted protection of only 3.1–5.3% of weights.
  • On a real robot, 100 targeted flips produced 0/20 successes, compared with 14/20 clean and 16/20 under global-random flips.

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Bit-Flip Attacks on Vision-Language-Action Models: Action-Decoding Architecture Shapes the Vulnerability

arXiv cs.CR Yudong Gao, Linghan Chen, Wenhan Wu, Mia Zhou, Jiyao Wang, Kaiyan Ji, Mingyu Guo, Honglong Chen 2026-08-16 arXiv:2608.15475
Public signals Semantic Scholar citations 2 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 0
Providers: Hugging Face · N/A OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 2 · Influential citations 0 X · N/A Fetched 2026-09-12 14:25:35.580120 UTC

TL;DR - This paper presents the first bit-flip attack on quantized vision-language-action models, showing that a few targeted INT8 weight faults can reduce robotic task success to 0%. Vulnerability varies substantially with action-decoding architecture, making weight integrity critical for embodied AI security.

  • Gradient-selected flips are highly effective, while hundreds of random flips are harmless.
  • Direct-regression and token-policy heads fail after 1–5 flips; evaluated flow-matching policies require roughly 100–300.
  • Damaging bits cluster in a small number of action-generating layers, enabling targeted protection of only 3.1–5.3% of weights.
  • On a real robot, 100 targeted flips produced 0/20 successes, compared with 14/20 clean and 16/20 under global-random flips.
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