Suppression Sticks, Locality Is Fragile: A Closed-Loop Target-and-Control Audit of Task-Vector Negation in VLA Policies
Task-vector arithmetic offers a closed-form way to modify a model, yet its behavioral locality remains unclear in closed-loop robot control. We present a target-and-control audit of per-skill task-vector subtraction from multitask vision-language-action (VLA) policies. Across all ten LIBERO-Goal skills, subtraction produces three qualitatively different regimes: target-control separation for five skills, resistance for three, and global collapse for two. On held-out initial states, the five suppressible targets remain at 0% success; however, mean baseline-normalized control retention is only 52%, and each target-suppressing edit materially harms at least one nominally unrelated control. A...
| Authors | Shaoguang Wang, Weiyu Guo, Rushi Dai et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.RO |
| Published | 5 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 August 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.