Bring the Apple, Not the Sofa: Impact of Irrelevant Context in Embodied AI Commands on VLA Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Pugacheva, Daria, Moskalenko, Andrey, Shepelev, Denis, Kuznetsov, Andrey, Shakhuro, Vlad, Tutubalina, Elena
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Pugacheva, Daria
Moskalenko, Andrey
Shepelev, Denis
Kuznetsov, Andrey
Shakhuro, Vlad
Tutubalina, Elena
author_facet Pugacheva, Daria
Moskalenko, Andrey
Shepelev, Denis
Kuznetsov, Andrey
Shakhuro, Vlad
Tutubalina, Elena
contents Vision Language Action (VLA) models are widely used in Embodied AI, enabling robots to interpret and execute language instructions. However, their robustness to natural language variability in real-world scenarios has not been thoroughly investigated. In this work, we present a novel systematic study of the robustness of state-of-the-art VLA models under linguistic perturbations. Specifically, we evaluate model performance under two types of instruction noise: (1) human-generated paraphrasing and (2) the addition of irrelevant context. We further categorize irrelevant contexts into two groups according to their length and their semantic and lexical proximity to robot commands. In this study, we observe consistent performance degradation as context size expands. We also demonstrate that the model can exhibit relative robustness to random context, with a performance drop within 10%, while semantically and lexically similar context of the same length can trigger a quality decline of around 50%. Human paraphrases of instructions lead to a drop of nearly 20%. To mitigate this, we propose an LLM-based filtering framework that extracts core commands from noisy inputs. Incorporating our filtering step allows models to recover up to 98.5% of their original performance under noisy conditions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_07067
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bring the Apple, Not the Sofa: Impact of Irrelevant Context in Embodied AI Commands on VLA Models
Pugacheva, Daria
Moskalenko, Andrey
Shepelev, Denis
Kuznetsov, Andrey
Shakhuro, Vlad
Tutubalina, Elena
Robotics
Vision Language Action (VLA) models are widely used in Embodied AI, enabling robots to interpret and execute language instructions. However, their robustness to natural language variability in real-world scenarios has not been thoroughly investigated. In this work, we present a novel systematic study of the robustness of state-of-the-art VLA models under linguistic perturbations. Specifically, we evaluate model performance under two types of instruction noise: (1) human-generated paraphrasing and (2) the addition of irrelevant context. We further categorize irrelevant contexts into two groups according to their length and their semantic and lexical proximity to robot commands. In this study, we observe consistent performance degradation as context size expands. We also demonstrate that the model can exhibit relative robustness to random context, with a performance drop within 10%, while semantically and lexically similar context of the same length can trigger a quality decline of around 50%. Human paraphrases of instructions lead to a drop of nearly 20%. To mitigate this, we propose an LLM-based filtering framework that extracts core commands from noisy inputs. Incorporating our filtering step allows models to recover up to 98.5% of their original performance under noisy conditions.
title Bring the Apple, Not the Sofa: Impact of Irrelevant Context in Embodied AI Commands on VLA Models
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07067