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Do Vision-Language-Action Models Understand Instructions? A Mechanistic Interpretability Study on Language Grounding

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Oct 7, 2026 · UTC

Vision-Language-Action models are designed to generalise across environments and task descriptions, raising the question of whether their action generation actually depends on the language instruction, or whether they largely rely on visual cues and superficial correlations. Robustness to variance in the visual and linguistic observation space is critical for real-world deployment, yet VLAs lack explicit grounding modules and instead rely on the intrinsic language grounding capabilities of their Vision-Language model backbones. For this reason, we conduct a controlled mechanistic interpretabil

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