Mitch Pryor
2026
Limited Linguistic Diversity in Embodied AI Datasets
Selma Liliane Wanna | Agnes Luhtaru | Jonathan Salfity | Ryan Barron | Juston Moore | Cynthia Matuszek | Mitch Pryor
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Selma Liliane Wanna | Agnes Luhtaru | Jonathan Salfity | Ryan Barron | Juston Moore | Cynthia Matuszek | Mitch Pryor
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Language plays a critical role in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, yet the linguistic characteristics of the datasets used to train and evaluate these systems remain poorly documented. In this work, we present a systematic dataset audit of several widely used VLA corpora, aiming to characterize what kinds of instructions these datasets actually contain and how much linguistic variety they provide. We quantify instruction language along complementary dimensions—including lexical variety, duplication and overlap, semantic similarity, and syntactic complexity. Our analysis shows that many datasets rely on highly repetitive, template-like commands with limited structural variation, yielding a narrow distribution of instruction forms. We position these findings as descriptive documentation of the language signal available in current VLA training and evaluation data, intended to support more detailed dataset reporting, more principled dataset selection, and targeted curation or augmentation strategies that broaden language coverage.