Pre-VLA: Preemptive Runtime Verification for Reliable Vision-Language-Action and World-Model Rollouts

Pre-VLA: Preemptive Runtime Verification for Reliable Vision-Language-Action and World-Model Rollouts

Zhen Sun, Yongjian Guo, Haoran Sun, Luqiao Wang, Wei Lu, Jiachi Ji, Shengzhe Ji, Junwu Xiong, Zhijun Meng · University of Warwick, University of Cambridge, HIT · 2026

Summary

A lightweight runtime verification layer that preemptively prunes unsafe VLA and world-model actions before they reach robot hardware, eliminating collision and droppage failures.

Abstract Summary

Deployment of large Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and generative world models in safety-critical robotics remains risky because these models can hallucinate or produce out-of-distribution actions. Pre-VLA introduces a lightweight runtime verification layer that intercepts VLA and world-model rollouts before dangerous commands reach the robot hardware. The authors propose a formal specification language for embodied tasks expressed over spatio-temporal predicates such as "gripper must not collide with fragile objects during approach" and "carried items must remain upright." A learned monitor, trained on safe and unsafe action sequences, preemptively prunes action chunks that violate these specifications. Unlike guardrails that only filter after generation, Pre-VLA operates inside the rollout loop, allowing the policy to recover by resampling from the remaining safe distribution. Pre-VLA introduces minimal runtime overhead—less than 5 milliseconds per action—and can operate on embedded compute platforms. Evaluation on a household mobile manipulator shows that Pre-VLA eliminates collision and droppage failures caused by VLA hallucinations without requiring any model retraining, making it a practical plug-and-play safety module for deployed embodied AI systems.

Key Points

  • Runtime verification layer for VLA and world-model safety.
  • Formal spatio-temporal task specifications for embodied tasks.
  • Learned monitor preemptively prunes unsafe action sequences.
  • Minimal overhead under 5 ms per action, deployable on embedded compute.
  • Eliminates collision and droppage failures on household mobile manipulator.

Additional Notes

Overview

  • SafeManip: A Property-Driven Benchmark for Temporal Safety Evaluation
  • Guide, Think and Act: Interactive Embodied Reasoning in VLA
  • RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models
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