What the Guard Misses, the Robot Executes: Implied Harm in VLA Instructions

Abstract:Vision-language-action models (VLAs) act on instructions without being able to refuse, so screening harmful requests falls to monitors. We test whether these monitors catch ordinary robot tasks requested for harmful reasons, holding the task fixed while varying only how explicitly the intent is stated. $\pi_{0.5}$ completes the task at every level of explicitness, as often as for harmless controls. Text guards flag nearly every blunt request but few implied ones: up to 95% of implied-harm runs end with the task done and no flag raised, and up to 90% even after recalibrating on robot instructions. Monitoring the model's activations does not close this gap. Linear probes separate harmful from harmless instructions almost perfectly in the base language and vision-language models, but this separation weakens after robot training in two model families, most for implied harm.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.05818 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.05818v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.05818 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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