Do Vision-Language-Action Models Mean What They Say? On the Role of Faithfulness in Embodied Reasoning
Embodied Chain-of-Thought has emerged as a promising mechanism to enhance robot decision-making and interpretability in black-box Vision-Language Action (VLA) models. However, whether this verbalized Chain-of-Thought truthfully reflects the policy's underlying decision process remains poorly understood. We distinguish between functional reasoning, in which reasoning improves task performance, and faithful reasoning, in which reasoning truly reflects the policy's internal decision process. We arg
Record details
Published: 6 July 2026
Source: arXiv
Category: Research
Topics: Regulation · Safety & alignment · Agents & autonomy
Retrieved: 14 July 2026
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ethics.ai (6 July 2026), “Do Vision-Language-Action Models Mean What They Say? On the Role of Faithfulness in Embodied Reasoning,” evidence record 210, https://ethics.ai/record/210 (originally published by arXiv).
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