Dantong Niu


2025

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Do What? Teaching Vision-Language-Action Models to Reject the Impossible
Wen-Han Hsieh | Elvis Hsieh | Dantong Niu | Trevor Darrell | Roei Herzig | David M. Chan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025

Recently, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong performance on a range of robotic tasks. These models rely on multimodal inputs, with language instructions playing a crucial role-not only in predicting actions, but also in robustly interpreting user intent, even when the requests are impossible to fulfill. In this work, we investigate how VLAs can recognize, interpret, and respond to false-premise instructions-natural language commands that reference objects or conditions absent from the environment. We propose — Instruct-Verify-and-Act (IVA) — a unified framework that (i) detects when an instruction cannot be executed due to a false premise, (ii) engages in language-based clarification or correction, and (iii) grounds plausible alternatives in perception and action. Towards this end, we construct a large-scale instruction tuning setup with structured language prompts and train a VLA model capable of handling both accurate and erroneous requests. Our approach leverages a contextually augmented, semi-synthetic dataset containing paired positive and false-premise instructions, enabling robust detection and natural language correction. Our experiments show that IVA can improves false premise detection accuracy by 58.89% over baselines, while increasing successful responses in false-premise scenarios by 27.89%.