FabriMAE I Trust Myself? Self-Evaluating VLA Action Generation with Markov Attention Entropy
On the map: Vision-language-action models → VLA architectures and generalization
Abstract (arXiv)
Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) integrate visual perception, language instruction, and action generation into end-to-end policies across heterogeneous architectures. However, enabling VLAs to self-evaluate their action generation reliability without external supervision remains a major challenge. Existing methods either rely on expert annotations or estimate uncertainty only from output statistics, largely ignoring internal signals. In this work, we observe that internal visual modality entropy exhibits consistent distinctions between successful and failed tasks across heterogeneous VLAs. Although VLAs' architectures differ in their action generation, we show that they share a common latent action generation abstraction evolving under visual perception, language instruction, and State Input, which we formulate as a Conditional Generative Markov Chain. Based on this formulation, we propose MAE (Markov Attention Entropy), a self-evaluation framework that directly converts internal attention signals into architecture-aware reliability scores, and introduce LIBERO-Reflect, a 4,000-episode benchmark combining 2,000 standard episodes and 2,000 challenging episodes across four subsets. Extensive experiments across heterogeneous VLA architectures and diverse scenarios show that MAE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on AUPR, AUROC, and FPR@95.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in VLA architectures and generalization, one of 13 directions in Vision-language-action models. Builds on 28 of its 34 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Aug 2026.
Builds on
28 of 34 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2026Not All Features Are Created Equal: A Mechanistic Study of Vision-Language-Action Models19 Mar
- 2026Observing and Controlling Features in Vision-Language-Action Models5 Mar
Other references · 26
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- 2025Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models: Optimizing Speed and Successcited by 844
- 2023Semantic Uncertainty: Linguistic Invariances for Uncertainty Estimation in Natural Language Generationcited by 795
- 2023Just Ask for Calibration: Strategies for Eliciting Calibrated Confidence Scores from Language Models Fine-Tuned with Human Feedbackcited by 788
- 2023SelfCheckGPT: Zero-Resource Black-Box Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Modelscited by 787
- 2022Teaching Models to Express Their Uncertainty in Wordscited by 731
- 2025FAST: Efficient Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 643
14 more
- 2020How Can We Know When Language Models Know? On the Calibration of Language Models for Question Answeringcited by 439
- 2022Prompting GPT-3 To Be Reliablecited by 258
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- 2025LIBERO-PRO: Towards Robust and Fair Evaluation of Vision-Language-Action Models Beyond Memorizationcited by 166
- 2024AHA: A Vision-Language-Model for Detecting and Reasoning Over Failures in Robotic Manipulationcited by 118
- 2025CoT-Kinetics: A Theoretical Modeling Assessing LRM Reasoning Processcited by 50
- 2025FailSafe: Reasoning and Recovery from Failures in Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 33
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- 2025Evaluating Uncertainty and Quality of Vision-Language-Action-enabled Robotscited by 17
- 2025RoVer: Robot Reward Model as Test-Time Verifier for Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 16
- 2025Confidence Calibration in Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 10
- 2026Self-Refining Vision Language Model for Robotic Failure Detection and Reasoningcited by 6
- 2026ReconVLA: An Uncertainty-Guided and Failure-Aware Vision-Language-Action Framework for Robotic Controlcited by 5
- 2026Your Vision-Language-Action Model Already Has Attention Heads For Path Deviation Detectioncited by 3
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