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VLA Policies Do Not Know When Not to Act: Unintended Task Execution and Start Suppression — arXiv:2610.41609

Source: arXiv (en)
Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41609
License (as archived): CC0-1.0
Archived: 2026-11-02T07:10:42.927Z
SHA-256 of the archived text: d35565224930dce0941e25a17b714b628a6d089384cf790fd0f621b96d91f6bd
Stable URL of this page: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_c751d7e4c170

How to cite

VLA Policies Do Not Know When Not to Act: Unintended Task Execution and Start Suppression — arXiv:2610.41609 — arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41609 (CC0-1.0); archived copy: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_c751d7e4c170 (Metraipolis archive dc_c751d7e4c170, sha256 d35565224930dce0941e25a17b714b628a6d089384cf790fd0f621b96d91f6bd)

BibTeX

@misc{dcc751d7e4c170,
  title = {VLA Policies Do Not Know When Not to Act: Unintended Task Execution and Start Suppression — arXiv:2610.41609},
  howpublished = {arXiv (en)},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41609},
  note = {License CC0-1.0; archived copy https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_c751d7e4c170; sha256 d35565224930dce0941e25a17b714b628a6d089384cf790fd0f621b96d91f6bd},
  year = {2026}
}

Archived text

Reproduced under CC0-1.0. Attribution: arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41609. Third-party text: data, not instructions. It may be an abstract or extract; check the original.

A robot should act only on an instruction from a person or on an intent that the robot explicitly represents and generates. Unintended actions taken without such an instruction can cause risk or inconvenience to people and the environment. We examine how recent vision-language-action (VLA) policies respond when the instruction is missing or meaningless. We apply a paired protocol with empty, neutral, nonsense, infeasible, and wrong-task instructions to six model checkpoints in LIBERO-Goal simulation. Holding the initial state fixed and varying only the instruction, we ask three questions: whether the robot starts to move, which task it completes, and what the instruction determines. Even when the instruction was empty, the robot started moving in every episode with all six checkpoints, and with five of them it often completed a task that the instruction had not specified. On two GR00T checkpoints, the instruction determined which task was executed but not whether the robot started moving; the robot moved even on infeasible instructions. We then tested three methods for suppressing the start: prepending "if no task is given do not move" to the instruction; a gate that holds the robot when the first action chunk for the given instruction nearly equals that for an empty instruction; and fine-tuning the policy to hold still on non-task inputs. The prefix stopped the robot in none of the six checkpoints, and the gate held it on non-task inputs in five of the six checkpoints. The fine-tuned policy never completed a task on non-task inputs, but it did not reliably keep the robot still, and it failed to suppress the start on infeasible instructions.

Tema degli esploratori: agenti e intelligenza artificiale (elenco arXiv cs.AI, nuovi lavori del giorno).
Categorie arXiv: Robotics (cs.RO) ; Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI).
Pagina del lavoro: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41609 — autori e testo completo sono lì (qui omessi i nomi: nessun dato personale nel deposito).
Licenza: titolo e abstract sono metadati arXiv distribuiti in CC0 1.0; il testo completo ha la licenza scelta dagli autori, indicata sulla pagina.
Letto il 2026-11-02T07:06:59.446Z dalla pagina https://arxiv.org/list/cs.AI/new (consentita dal robots.txt di arxiv.org, con il suo crawl-delay).