VLA-Hijack: A Transferable Patch Attack against Vision-Language-Action Models via Visual Proprioception Hijacking

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.28083v1
• Date: Wed, 27 May 2026 07:38:16 GMT
• Title: VLA-Hijack: A Transferable Patch Attack against Vision-Language-Action Models via Visual Proprioception Hijacking
• Abstract summary: VLA-Hijack is a unified adversarial framework for Vision-Language-Action models.<n>It exploits a fundamental vulnerability by exploiting a shared visual self-localization process.<n>It achieves superior optimization efficiency in white-box settings and sets a new SOTA for cross-architecture and cross-domain black-box transferability.
• Score: 49.51251398232003
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as powerful generalist policies, their severe vulnerability to adversarial patches significantly hinders their deployment in safety-critical domains. Moreover, existing patch attacks primarily focus on white-box settings, heavily overfitting to the specific action output space of the target model, which results in poor cross-architecture transferability. To overcome this limitation, we propose VLA-Hijack, a unified adversarial framework that breaks the transferability bottleneck by exploiting a fundamental vulnerability identified in this work: before planning any motion, a VLA model must first use visual information to locate its own robotic arm within the environment. Targeting this shared visual self-localization process, our approach concurrently optimizes Attention-Guided Proprioceptive Suppression to inhibit the real robotic arm's features, and Multimodal Proprioceptive Injection to establish the patch as a surrogate "phantom embodiment". By alternating between semantic concept anchoring and visual prototype projection, VLA-Hijack effectively severs the semantic relationship between the agent's true embodiment and its control policy. Extensive experiments across diverse architectures (OpenVLA, UniVLA, and CronusVLA) demonstrate that VLA-Hijack achieves superior optimization efficiency in white-box settings and sets a new SOTA for cross-architecture and cross-domain black-box transferability.

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