VLA-GAUGE: Systematically Evaluating Generalization and Robustness in Vision-Language-Action Models
Jun Xiao, Rui Ye, Dong Cao, Jinyu Gu, Ying Wang, Zhiliang Zhu
Abstract
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 $π_{0.5}$'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.