Position: Vision-Language-Action Models Cannot Be Verified to Perform Physical Reasoning
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) systems, built on pretrained vision-language models (VLMs), have shown rapidly improving performance on robot manipulation benchmarks. These gains are commonly interpreted as evidence that semantic representations learned from internet-scale data transfer to physical execution generalization. This position paper argues that the assumption underlying this interpretation -- that semantic generalization is sufficient to support physical action decisions -- has not been independently verified and cannot be tested under current evaluation protocols. We support this claim by decomposing VLA policies into semantic mapping and physical action decision, and showing tha...
| Authors | Taozhao Chen, Ian Manchester, Huaming Chen |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.RO |
| Published | 28 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 June 2026 |
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