[Submitted on 1 Oct 2026]
Title:SocialVLA: A Social Perception Gateway for Human-Reaction-Based Failure Detection and Recovery in VLA Manipulation
View a PDF of the paper titled SocialVLA: A Social Perception Gateway for Human-Reaction-Based Failure Detection and Recovery in VLA Manipulation, by Sofya Konstantinova and 3 other authors
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Abstract:Vision-language-action (VLA) policies enable diverse robotic manipulation but can fail during execution without recognizing their own errors. Human observers provide complementary signals, as unexpected robot behavior can trigger rapid vocal, facial, or verbal reactions before failure is completed. We introduce SocialVLA, a local, policy-agnostic social perception gateway that converts spontaneous human reactions into runtime intervention signals for VLA manipulation. SocialVLA combines causal paralinguistic audio detection, visual reaction recognition, explicit stop phrases, and robot-relevance estimation. An asynchronous first-event fusion mechanism triggers a VLA hold from the earliest sufficiently confident signal, while a separate speech channel captures verbal corrections for participant-directed continuation, restart, or instruction revision. We evaluate SocialVLA on physical Unitree G1 manipulation using 15 participants, with 238 annotated intervention-worthy episodes and 1.038 h of non-intervention behavior. Frozen offline replay achieves 54.6% recall and 69.5% precision, while unfiltered audio-video fusion reaches 64.3% recall. Relevance estimation reduces false-stop episodes from 100 to 57 and increases precision from 60.5% to 69.8%. In prospective deployment on an unseen 16th participant, the frozen system achieves 59.5% recall and 91.7% precision. Median detector-to-fusion latency is 47.9 ms, VLA-gate-to-physical-hold latency is 336 ms, and reaction-onset-to-hold latency is 1.021 s. These results demonstrate a complete local pathway from spontaneous social reaction to physical VLA interruption and participant-directed recovery.
Subjects:
Robotics (cs.RO)
Cite as: arXiv:2610.02360 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2610.02360v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.02360
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Miguel Altamirano Cabrera [view email] [v1] Thu, 1 Oct 2026 18:36:35 UTC (696 KB)
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