A Safe Action Is Not Enough: Feasible-Future Decoding for Vision-Language-Action Policies

arXiv:2610.05166v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A safe action is not necessarily a viable one. Under a frozen vision-language-action (VLA) policy, an action can be likely and locally admissible yet leave no policy-supported route to safe task completion. We call this the feasibility-likelihood gap: likelihood ranks the current action, whereas feasibility depends on the futures that remain after it. We derive the exact next-block marginal of the history-conditioned policy-environment trajectory law restricted to safe task completion. The derivation exposes a candidate-dependent feasible-future mass with two roles: its support records whether safe completion remains possible under the frozen continuation process, and its magnitude measures how much weighted safe-completion mass is preserved. Exact evaluation is impractical online, so we develop a selective finite-candidate approximation, derive conditions for recovering the best retained viable candidate, and instantiate it as an alarm-triggered, training-free reranker. On Safety-CHORES, VICS-G lowers mean cumulative safety cost by 1.9%-57.5% across six settings while remaining within 2.5 percentage points of policy sampling in success and 0.82 steps in mean episode length. The resulting decoder is tied to an exact policy-relative safe-completion target, yet requires neither retraining of the base policy nor online trajectory rollouts.

Abstract:A safe action is not necessarily a viable one. Under a frozen vision-language-action (VLA) policy, an action can be likely and locally admissible yet leave no policy-supported route to safe task completion. We call this the feasibility-likelihood gap: likelihood ranks the current action, whereas feasibility depends on the futures that remain after it. We derive the exact next-block marginal of the history-conditioned policy-environment trajectory law restricted to safe task completion. The derivation exposes a candidate-dependent feasible-future mass with two roles: its support records whether safe completion remains possible under the frozen continuation process, and its magnitude measures how much weighted safe-completion mass is preserved. Exact evaluation is impractical online, so we develop a selective finite-candidate approximation, derive conditions for recovering the best retained viable candidate, and instantiate it as an alarm-triggered, training-free reranker. On Safety-CHORES, VICS-G lowers mean cumulative safety cost by 1.9%-57.5% across six settings while remaining within 2.5 percentage points of policy sampling in success and 0.82 steps in mean episode length. The resulting decoder is tied to an exact policy-relative safe-completion target, yet requires neither retraining of the base policy nor online trajectory rollouts.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.05166 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2610.05166v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.05166 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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A Safe Action Is Not Enough: Feasible-Future Decoding for Vision-Language-Action Policies

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