FLARE: A Failure-Aware Framework for Autonomous Correction and Recovery in Visual-Language Robotic Manipulation

arXiv:2608.26645v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action Models~(VLAs) have demonstrated significant promise in generalizing to complex, long-horizon robotic manipulation tasks. However, their performance remains brittle, as they are typically trained on trajectory-monotonic, failure-free demonstrations. This reliance on ``perfect" data leaves them unable to recover from common execution errors, such as a missed grasp, a dropped object, or an unexpected collision. In this paper, we propose FLARE, a novel framework that endows VLAs with robust error recovery capabilities through a ``Retry" and ``Reset" paradigm. First, we introduce a ``Retry" mechanism by injecting perturbation and bridging segments that decouple robot pose from environment state into demonstrations, enabling the policy to autonomously handle execution deviations. Second, to address critical, state-breaking (OOD) failures, we introduce a ``Reset" pipeline. We leverage an MLLM for offline failure analysis to automatically identify OOD states from execution videos. This analysis enables the efficient, targeted collection of a small library of object-centric ``Reset" skills, which are trained to restore the environment to a task-valid state. Our full framework integrates these learned policies. At inference, an online MLLM monitor arbitrates between task execution and ``Reset" skills. Experiments on challenging, contact-rich manipulation tasks show our approach significantly improves task success and robustness.

Abstract:Vision-Language-Action Models~(VLAs) have demonstrated significant promise in generalizing to complex, long-horizon robotic manipulation tasks. However, their performance remains brittle, as they are typically trained on trajectory-monotonic, failure-free demonstrations. This reliance on ``perfect" data leaves them unable to recover from common execution errors, such as a missed grasp, a dropped object, or an unexpected collision. In this paper, we propose FLARE, a novel framework that endows VLAs with robust error recovery capabilities through a ``Retry" and ``Reset" paradigm. First, we introduce a ``Retry" mechanism by injecting perturbation and bridging segments that decouple robot pose from environment state into demonstrations, enabling the policy to autonomously handle execution deviations. Second, to address critical, state-breaking (OOD) failures, we introduce a ``Reset" pipeline. We leverage an MLLM for offline failure analysis to automatically identify OOD states from execution videos. This analysis enables the efficient, targeted collection of a small library of object-centric ``Reset" skills, which are trained to restore the environment to a task-valid state. Our full framework integrates these learned policies. At inference, an online MLLM monitor arbitrates between task execution and ``Reset" skills. Experiments on challenging, contact-rich manipulation tasks show our approach significantly improves task success and robustness.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2608.26645 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2608.26645v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.26645 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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FLARE: A Failure-Aware Framework for Autonomous Correction and Recovery in Visual-Language Robotic Manipulation

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