Not What You Asked For: Typographic Attacks in Household Robot Manipulation

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that typographic attacks on vision-language models like CLIP can cause household robots to physically manipulate the wrong objects, revealing a significant safety vulnerability.

Contribution

It introduces a new evaluation of typographic attacks in a household robot manipulation pipeline and shows their real-world impact on robot safety.

Findings

Attack success rate of 67.8% under realistic conditions

Typographic errors lead to physical grasping of incorrect objects

Reveals safety risks in current robot manipulation pipelines

Abstract

Open-vocabulary embodied AI agents increasingly rely on vision-language models such as CLIP for object perception and task grounding. However, the shared embedding space that enables this flexibility introduces a structural vulnerability to typographic attacks, where printed text in a physical scene semantically overrides visual judgment. While prior work has quantified this threat in static 2D benchmarks and 3D navigation tasks, its impact on the full Sense-Plan-Act pipeline of household robot manipulation remains unexplored. This work evaluates typographic attacks in a Habitat-based simulation using the HomeRobot benchmark. We introduce a decoupled perception architecture that exposes a frozen CLIP encoder to adversarial stickers while maintaining geometric grounding via DETIC. In a controlled evaluation pool of 59 attributable episodes, the attack achieves an overall Attack Success Rate (ASR) of 67.8%, rising to 70.0% among fully successful episodes, under uncontrolled viewing angles and occlusion with no perceptual optimization. Critically, we find that perceptual errors propagate through the persistent 3D semantic map to produce kinetic failures, defined here as physically executed grasping and transport of the wrong object driven by an adversarially poisoned semantic state. In these cases, the robot physically grasps and delivers the wrong object to a target receptacle. These results establish typographic misclassification as a real, measurable, and physically consequential threat to the safety of modular manipulation pipelines that prior typographic attack research has left unexamined.