# VLA-GAUGE: Systematically Evaluating Generalization and Robustness in Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16567 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16567/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Generalist VLA models and benchmarks, one of 13 directions in Vision-language-action models.
- Builds on 41 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- Vision-language-action models / [Generalist VLA models and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/vla/generalist-vla-models-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09246/) (2024)
- [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24164/) (2024)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16054/) (2025)
- [LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03310/) (2023)
- [GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14734/) (2025)
- [Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models: Optimizing Speed and Success](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19645/) (2025)
- [RLBench: The Robot Learning Benchmark & Learning Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12271/) (2019)
- [FAST: Efficient Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09747/) (2025)
- [CALVIN: A Benchmark for Language-Conditioned Policy Learning for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03227/) (2021)
- [robosuite: A Modular Simulation Framework and Benchmark for Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12293/) (2020)
- [Evaluating Real-World Robot Manipulation Policies in Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05941/) (2024)
- [UniVLA: Learning to Act Anywhere with Task-centric Latent Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06111/) (2025)
- [Vision-Language Foundation Models as Effective Robot Imitators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01378/) (2023)
- [ManiSkill2: A Unified Benchmark for Generalizable Manipulation Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04659/) (2023)
- [X-VLA: Soft-Prompted Transformer as Scalable Cross-Embodiment Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10274/) (2025)
- [LIBERO-PRO: Towards Robust and Fair Evaluation of Vision-Language-Action Models Beyond Memorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03827/) (2025)
- [VLABench: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Language-Conditioned Robotics Manipulation with Long-Horizon Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18194/) (2024)
- [ManipLLM: Embodied Multimodal Large Language Model for Object-Centric Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16217/) (2023)
- [SimpleVLA-RL: Scaling VLA Training via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09674/) (2025)
- [VLA-Adapter: An Effective Paradigm for Tiny-Scale Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09372/) (2025)
- [Interactive Post-Training for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17016/) (2025)
- [THE COLOSSEUM: A Benchmark for Evaluating Generalization for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08191/) (2024)
- [NORA: A Small Open-Sourced Generalist Vision Language Action Model for Embodied Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19854/) (2025)
- [Decomposing the Generalization Gap in Imitation Learning for Visual Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03659/) (2023)
- [RobustNav: Towards Benchmarking Robustness in Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04531/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) have achieved high success rates on familiar manipulation tasks, yet it remains unclear whether such scores reflect genuine zero-shot generalization and perturbation robustness. Existing evaluation frameworks provide limited capability-level diagnosis and combinatorial perturbation coverage, often without connecting diagnosis to targeted model refinement. We introduce VLA-GAUGE, a diagnostic framework that unifies both evaluations under a shared executable task representation. It combines (1) paired in-distribution and out-of-distribution tasks across six capability suites, (2) single-factor sensitivity analysis with combinatorial perturbation screening and evaluation, and (3) diagnosis-driven refinement through targeted data augmentation and model fine-tuning. We evaluate 12 VLAs spanning different model sizes and action-modeling paradigms under a unified protocol. We find that (1) The mean Zero-Shot Score on VLA-GAUGE is only 22.3%, with SimpleVLA-RL scoring 8.0% and ranking second to last among the evaluated models. (2) Under three representative combinatorial perturbation configurations, the mean R-Score is 9.3. (3) Diagnosis-driven fine-tuning improves π0.5's zero-shot generalization and robustness under a selected perturbation combination on held-out scenarios by 72.4 and 31.8 scoring points, respectively; the latter exceeds the 10.9-point gain from LIBERO-Plus single-factor fine-tuning despite fewer successful training trajectories. These results show that high reported success rates on familiar manipulation tasks do not guarantee strong zero-shot generalization to unseen tasks or robustness to combinatorial perturbations, while diagnostic evaluation provides actionable signals for targeted model improvement.