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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Xie, William, Rice, Enora, Correll, Nikolaus
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18792
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author Xie, William
Rice, Enora
Correll, Nikolaus
author_facet Xie, William
Rice, Enora
Correll, Nikolaus
contents Humans learn how and when to apply forces in the world via a complex physiological and psychological learning process. Attempting to replicate this in vision-language models (VLMs) presents two challenges: VLMs can produce harmful behavior, which is particularly dangerous for VLM-controlled robots which interact with the world, but imposing behavioral safeguards can limit their functional and ethical extents. We conduct two case studies on safeguarding VLMs which generate forceful robotic motion, finding that safeguards reduce both harmful and helpful behavior involving contact-rich manipulation of human body parts. Then, we discuss the key implication of this result--that value alignment may impede desirable robot capabilities--for model evaluation and robot learning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_18792
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Dual-Use Dilemma in Physical Reasoning and Force
Xie, William
Rice, Enora
Correll, Nikolaus
Robotics
Humans learn how and when to apply forces in the world via a complex physiological and psychological learning process. Attempting to replicate this in vision-language models (VLMs) presents two challenges: VLMs can produce harmful behavior, which is particularly dangerous for VLM-controlled robots which interact with the world, but imposing behavioral safeguards can limit their functional and ethical extents. We conduct two case studies on safeguarding VLMs which generate forceful robotic motion, finding that safeguards reduce both harmful and helpful behavior involving contact-rich manipulation of human body parts. Then, we discuss the key implication of this result--that value alignment may impede desirable robot capabilities--for model evaluation and robot learning.
title On the Dual-Use Dilemma in Physical Reasoning and Force
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18792