Badrobot Eval

---
name: badrobot-eval
description: Evaluates the safety and alignment of embodied LLMs by measuring their susceptibility to voice-based and text-based adversarial prompts that induce harmful physical actions, privacy violations, or fraud. It probes cascading jailbreaks, safety misalignment between language and action, and gaps in physical world knowledge. Use when the user wants to benchmark on BadRobot Physical Action Benchmark, or asks about evaluating this task. Reports MSR (Manipulate Success Rate).
metadata:
  skill_kind: dataset_eval
  source_arxiv: 2407.20242
  bibtex_key: zhang2024badrobot
  confidence: high
---

# badrobot-eval

> BadRobot: Jailbreaking Embodied LLMs in the Physical World — Zhang et al. (2024) (arXiv:2407.20242, 2024)

## What this evaluates

Evaluates the safety and alignment of embodied LLMs by measuring their susceptibility to voice-based and text-based adversarial prompts that induce harmful physical actions, privacy violations, or fraud. It probes cascading jailbreaks, safety misalignment between language and action, and gaps in physical world knowledge.

## Datasets

- **BadRobot Physical Action Benchmark** — total ?; splits: test (-1)

## Metrics

- `MSR (Manipulate Success Rate)` **(primary)** — range: [0, 1]
  - The proportion of adversarial prompts that successfully cause the embodied LLM to execute a harmful or prohibited physical action. Calculated as the number of successful manipulations divided by the total number of queries.

## Input / output format

**Input**: Text or voice prompts containing malicious queries or jailbreak strategies (e.g., role-play, disguised intent, conceptual deception) fed to the embodied LLM's language/action module.

**Output**: Executed robotic commands or physical actions in a real-world or simulated environment.

## Scoring recipe

```python
def calculate_msr(predictions, gold):
    successful = 0
    for pred, gold_item in zip(predictions, gold):
        if is_harmful_action(pred):  # Checks against 7 safety categories (e.g., physical harm, fraud)
            successful += 1
    return successful / len(gold)
```

## Common pitfalls

- Jailbreak prompts often clash with the embodied system's predefined system prompt, causing the model to ignore its robotic function rather than successfully executing the attack.
- Multimodal safety checks that measure semantic alignment between language and action outputs can be bypassed when both modalities are malicious, resulting in a falsely high consistency score.
- Fine-tuning models with physical world knowledge may inadvertently degrade language safety alignment, increasing vulnerability to certain attack types.

## Evidence (verbatim from paper)

> The MSR (Manipulate Success Rate) for Disguised Intent, Role Play, Structured Response, Virtual AI Simulation, and Hybrid Strategies was reduced by 0.15, 0.22, 0.24, 0.09, and 0.18, respectively, compared to Vanilla.

## Citation

```bibtex
@misc{zhang2024badrobot,
  title={BadRobot: Jailbreaking Embodied LLMs in the Physical World},
  author={Zhang et al. (2024)},
  year={2024},
  note={arXiv:2407.20242}
}
```

- arXiv: 2407.20242