Stable Language Guidance for Vision-Language-Action Models

Abstract

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in generalized robotic control; however, they remain notoriously brittle to linguistic perturbations. We identify a critical ``modality collapse'' phenomenon where strong visual priors overwhelm sparse linguistic signals, causing agents to overfit to specific instruction phrasings while ignoring the underlying semantic intent. To address this, we propose Residual Semantic Steering (RSS), a probabilistic framework that disentangles physical affordance from semantic execution. RSS introduces two theoretical innovations: (1) Monte Carlo Syntactic Integration, which approximates the true semantic posterior via dense, LLM-driven distributional expansion, and (2) Residual Affordance Steering, a dual-stream decoding mechanism that explicitly isolates the causal influence of language by subtracting the visual affordance prior. Theoretical analysis suggests that RSS effectively maximizes the mutual information between action and intent while suppressing visual distractors. Empirical results across diverse manipulation benchmarks demonstrate that RSS achieves state-of-the-art robustness, maintaining performance even under adversarial linguistic perturbations. We release our code at https://github.com/Doo-mon/RSS.