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

AbstractVision 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%. Our results highlights a critical gap in the safety and efficiency of modern VLA models for real-world deployment.