{"paper":{"title":"When Vision Overrides Language: Evaluating and Mitigating Counterfactual Failures in VLAs","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.RO"],"primary_cat":"cs.CV","authors_text":"Daniel Szafir, Dong Jing, Jiaqi Liu, Mingyu Ding, Yuchun Feng, Yue Yang, Yu Fang, Zhenyu Wei","submitted_at":"2026-02-19T18:59:20Z","abstract_excerpt":"Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) promise to ground language instructions in robot control, yet in practice often fail to faithfully follow language. When presented with instructions that lack strong scene-specific supervision, VLAs suffer from counterfactual failures: they act based on vision shortcuts induced by dataset biases, repeatedly executing well-learned behaviors and selecting objects frequently seen during training regardless of language intent. To systematically study it, we introduce LIBERO-CF, the first counterfactual benchmark for VLAs that evaluates language following capabi"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2602.17659","kind":"arxiv","version":2},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2602.17659/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}