[Submitted on 21 Oct 2026]
Title:Alpha: Systematic Fault Injection and Robustness Evaluation for LLM-Driven Embodied Manipulation
View a PDF of the paper titled Alpha: Systematic Fault Injection and Robustness Evaluation for LLM-Driven Embodied Manipulation, by Jona Joy
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Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into embodied robotic planning, yet standard benchmarks primarily evaluate end-to-end task completion in nominal environments, obscuring failure origins across the execution stack. We present Alpha, a systematic fault-injection and robustness-evaluation framework for LLM-driven manipulation in simulation. Alpha injects calibrated faults across perception (sensor lag), actuation (grip slip), kinematics (unreachable targets), and planning (planner-output corruption), alongside concurrent conditions. To separate physical vulnerabilities from planner sensitivities, we introduce a matched methodology pairing an LLM agent (Llama-3 via Ollama) against a deterministic Scripted Oracle planner across a balanced 150-episode matrix under identical seeds, geometries, and safety criteria. Across the matrix, the Oracle achieves 64.0% (48/75) success while the LLM achieves 44.0% (33/75) (paired McNemar p = 3.01 x 10^-4). Crucially, excluding planner-output corruption, performance across all physical and kinematic conditions is identical: 55.0% (33/60) for both planners with zero discordant pairs (McNemar p = 1.00). This demonstrates that physical actuator slip, kinematic reach boundaries, and perceptual staleness affect deterministic controllers and LLM planners equivalently. The performance gap is driven entirely by planner-output corruption (100% Oracle vs. 0% LLM), isolating the prompt-to-JSON serialization and validation interface rather than a cognitive reasoning deficit. We also audit 169 historical pilot attempts for transparency.
Comments: 9 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables. Code and reproduction artifacts: this https URL
Subjects:
Robotics (cs.RO)
Cite as: arXiv:2610.30197 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2610.30197v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.30197
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Jona Joy [view email] [v1] Wed, 21 Oct 2026 07:06:59 UTC (2,120 KB)
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