Capability and Robustness Cannot Both Be Free: An Information-Theoretic Bound for Vision-Language-Action Models
Provides a theoretical lower bound on the capability-robustness trade-off for VLA models, which is important for robot safety but the bound is currently loose for pixel-level analysis.
The paper proves an information-theoretic bound showing that for VLA models, the sum of capability and robustness is limited by task entropy plus adversarial channel capacity. On OpenVLA-7B, the policy already consumes 24% of the tighter encoder-specific budget, leaving limited room for simultaneous robustness improvement.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly deployed on real robots, where each predicted action is executed and each failure carries a safety cost. They reach high success rates on clean inputs but collapse under small adversarial perturbations. A $16/255$ PGD attack on OpenVLA-7B drops LIBERO success from above $95\%$ to under $5\%$. Empirical defenses recover some robustness at a cost in clean accuracy, but the literature does not say whether the trade-off has a theoretical floor. We prove that it does. For any VLA policy with discrete actions, the sum of capability (mutual information between policy action and oracle action) and robustness (mutual information preserved under adversarial perturbation, net of trivial channel leakage) is upper-bounded by a policy-independent budget: task entropy plus adversarial channel capacity. The proof is two applications of the Data Processing Inequality plus MI non-negativity. The pixel-level bound is loose on current models ($\sim 10^3$ nats), but an encoder-specific corollary restricts the channel to the policy-relevant subspace, reducing the budget from $\sim 5{,}000$ to $\sim 31$ nats on OpenVLA; the policy already consumes $\sim 24\%$ of this tighter budget, leaving limited room for simultaneous robustness improvement. We validate the bound across $252$ closed-form Gaussian-VLA cells and $48$ OpenVLA-7B $\times$ LIBERO $\times$ PGD cells (zero violations). We propose encoder-specific slack as a normalized comparison axis for defense papers, and release all code, manifests, and results.