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arXiv · 2608.17386

MANIGUARD: A Benchmark and Data Suite for Specification-Grounded Safety Evaluation and Improvement of Robotic Manipulation

Yiyan Peng·Philip Wang·Simon Sinong Zhan·Yiqi Lyu·Zhenyang Ni·Jixin Yan·Fiorelli Wong·Ruochen Jiao·Hang Yin·Xinyu Cao·Huajie Shao·Manling Li·Ruohan Zhang·Qi Zhu
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Abstract

Foundation-model policies for robotic manipulation are advancing rapidly on task success, but rigorous evaluation of whether they succeed safely is still lacking. We introduce ManiGuard, a specification-grounded framework for evaluating and improving the safety of foundation-model manipulation, comprising the ManiGuard-Bench task suite and a paired safety-annotated trajectory-generation pipeline. ManiGuard-Bench organizes six contact-rich household task families into 200 locked base tasks along a skill $\times$ constraint taxonomy, with safety specified independently of task success. Each task is evaluated under one in-distribution and four single-axis out-of-distribution perturbations that hold the safety specification fixed, giving 1,000 locked scenarios. Every rollout is runtime-checked by LTL$_f$-grounded automaton monitors over physics-grounded predicates rather than learned classifiers or LLM judges, in simulation and on a physical Franka platform. The pipeline pairs an automated motion-planning generator with human teleoperation, annotated by the same per-step monitor, and directly supports safety-aware fine-tuning; we release 8,000 safety-annotated demonstrations, 40 per base task. Benchmarking zero-shot and fine-tuned VLAs across more than 23,000 rollouts, we find: (i) safety must be evaluated independently of task success, as 6-21% of successful rollouts violate the specification; (ii) fine-tuning on our suite raises safe task completion from near zero to 7.5-29.8% and engaged-and-safe behavior from 16-40% to 51-72%; but (iii) a gap remains that scaling demonstrations does not close, with 21-42% of engaged rollouts still violating, two of six families below 2% safe success for every policy, and these failures persisting under distribution shift and on hardware.

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Yiyan Peng, Philip Wang, Simon Sinong Zhan, Yiqi Lyu, Zhenyang Ni, Jixin Yan, Fiorelli Wong, Ruochen Jiao, Hang Yin, Xinyu Cao, Huajie Shao, Manling Li, Ruohan Zhang, Qi Zhu. 2026-08-18. MANIGUARD: A Benchmark and Data Suite for Specification-Grounded Safety Evaluation and Improvement of Robotic Manipulation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17386

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