BadVLA: Towards Backdoor Attacks on Vision-Language-Action Models via Objective-Decoupled Optimization

TL;DR

This paper introduces BadVLA, a novel backdoor attack method on Vision-Language-Action models that achieves high success rates with minimal impact, revealing critical security vulnerabilities in these models.

Contribution

We propose the first backdoor attack technique on VLA models using Objective-Decoupled Optimization, exposing their security weaknesses.

Findings

Achieves near-100% attack success rate

Maintains high clean task accuracy

Robust against input perturbations and fine-tuning

Abstract

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced robotic control by enabling end-to-end decision-making directly from multimodal inputs. However, their tightly coupled architectures expose novel security vulnerabilities. Unlike traditional adversarial perturbations, backdoor attacks represent a stealthier, persistent, and practically significant threat-particularly under the emerging Training-as-a-Service paradigm-but remain largely unexplored in the context of VLA models. To address this gap, we propose BadVLA, a backdoor attack method based on Objective-Decoupled Optimization, which for the first time exposes the backdoor vulnerabilities of VLA models. Specifically, it consists of a two-stage process: (1) explicit feature-space separation to isolate trigger representations from benign inputs, and (2) conditional control deviations that activate only in the presence of the trigger, while preserving clean-task performance. Empirical results on multiple VLA benchmarks demonstrate that BadVLA consistently achieves near-100% attack success rates with minimal impact on clean task accuracy. Further analyses confirm its robustness against common input perturbations, task transfers, and model fine-tuning, underscoring critical security vulnerabilities in current VLA deployments. Our work offers the first systematic investigation of backdoor vulnerabilities in VLA models, highlighting an urgent need for secure and trustworthy embodied model design practices. We have released the project page at https://badvla-project.github.io/.