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arXiv · 2609.30913

Causeway: Restoring Task Accessibility for Instruction Switching in VLA Policies

Qingzi Wang·Kaixi Feng·Guangyao Shi·Xiyang Wu·Ang Li·Dinesh Manocha
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Abstract

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies can execute many tasks from standard initial states, yet a new instruction may fail after another task has altered the robot's physical state. We study instruction switching, where a new task is issued during or after the execution of a different one. We observe that a target task that is reliably completed from its standard initial states can become inaccessible from states produced by a preceding task. We call such states task islands. We propose Causeway, a training-free inference-time intervention. Given the current state and a re-entry pose for the target task, Causeway back-propagates through the frozen decoding computation and applies a state-directed write within the action-stream representation. The VLA decodes the return motion itself, without parameter updates, a new action head, or external action generation. Across 71 cross-object pairs, three switch timings, and three VLA architectures on LIBERO-Goal, Causeway raises bare-switch success from 3-26% to 47-65% and increases the rate of reaching the handoff neighborhood by 42-72 percentage points across models. Additional experiments on LIBERO-Object and a real xArm platform show that the recovery extends beyond the main LIBERO-Goal setting, both in simulation and on a robot.

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Qingzi Wang, Kaixi Feng, Guangyao Shi, Xiyang Wu, Ang Li, Dinesh Manocha. 2026-09-25. Causeway: Restoring Task Accessibility for Instruction Switching in VLA Policies. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30913

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