A robot policy misread "in the bowl": closed-form weight edits, with no retraining or instruction change, lift held-out success from 27/128 to 106/128
A zero-shot vision-language-action policy told to put the cube then the banana in the bowl releases the cube early because it binds "in the bowl" to the banana rather than the cube in its gripper. Closed-form instruction distillation writes the per-layer effect of a working rewording directly into the VLM's MLP weights, with no gradients, training data or change to the instruction; on 128 held-out seeds success rises from 27/128 to 106/128, while a random-direction update of the same size leaves success unchanged.