Do What? Teaching Vision-Language-Action Models to Reject the Impossible

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Hsieh, Wen-Han, Hsieh, Elvis, Niu, Dantong, Darrell, Trevor, Herzig, Roei, Chan, David M.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Hsieh, Wen-Han
Hsieh, Elvis
Niu, Dantong
Darrell, Trevor
Herzig, Roei
Chan, David M.
author_facet Hsieh, Wen-Han
Hsieh, Elvis
Niu, Dantong
Darrell, Trevor
Herzig, Roei
Chan, David M.
contents Recently, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong performance on a range of robotic tasks. These models rely on multimodal inputs, with language instructions playing a crucial role -- not only in predicting actions, but also in robustly interpreting user intent, even when the requests are impossible to fulfill. In this work, we investigate how VLAs can recognize, interpret, and respond to false-premise instructions: natural language commands that reference objects or conditions absent from the environment. We propose Instruct-Verify-and-Act (IVA), a unified framework that (i) detects when an instruction cannot be executed due to a false premise, (ii) engages in language-based clarification or correction, and (iii) grounds plausible alternatives in perception and action. Towards this end, we construct a large-scale instruction tuning setup with structured language prompts and train a VLA model capable of handling both accurate and erroneous requests. Our approach leverages a contextually augmented, semi-synthetic dataset containing paired positive and false-premise instructions, enabling robust detection and natural language correction. Our experiments show that IVA improves false premise detection accuracy by 97.56% over baselines, while increasing successful responses in false-premise scenarios by 50.78%.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_16292
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Do What? Teaching Vision-Language-Action Models to Reject the Impossible
Hsieh, Wen-Han
Hsieh, Elvis
Niu, Dantong
Darrell, Trevor
Herzig, Roei
Chan, David M.
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
Recently, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong performance on a range of robotic tasks. These models rely on multimodal inputs, with language instructions playing a crucial role -- not only in predicting actions, but also in robustly interpreting user intent, even when the requests are impossible to fulfill. In this work, we investigate how VLAs can recognize, interpret, and respond to false-premise instructions: natural language commands that reference objects or conditions absent from the environment. We propose Instruct-Verify-and-Act (IVA), a unified framework that (i) detects when an instruction cannot be executed due to a false premise, (ii) engages in language-based clarification or correction, and (iii) grounds plausible alternatives in perception and action. Towards this end, we construct a large-scale instruction tuning setup with structured language prompts and train a VLA model capable of handling both accurate and erroneous requests. Our approach leverages a contextually augmented, semi-synthetic dataset containing paired positive and false-premise instructions, enabling robust detection and natural language correction. Our experiments show that IVA improves false premise detection accuracy by 97.56% over baselines, while increasing successful responses in false-premise scenarios by 50.78%.
title Do What? Teaching Vision-Language-Action Models to Reject the Impossible
topic Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16292