arXiv AI

Benchmarking Vision-Language-Action Models on SO-101: Failure and Recovery Analysis

arXiv:2606. 08881v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization in robotic manipulation, yet existing evaluations are primarily conducted in simulation or on expensive robotic platforms, leaving their robustness on affordable real-world robots largely unexplored.

arXiv AI
Jun 11

DuoBench: A Reproducible Benchmark for Bimanual Manipulation in Simulation and the Real World

arXiv:2606. 11901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bimanual robot systems substantially expand manipulation capabilities, but coordinating two arms introduces additional control complexity and failure modes that are not well captured by existing benchmarks.

By Tobias J\"ulg, Seongjin Bien, Simon Hilber, Yannik Blei, Pierre Krack, Maximilian Li, Sven Parusel, Rudolf Lioutikov, Florian Walter, Wolfram Burgard
arXiv AI
4d ago

F4R: Failure-Driven Recognition, Reconstruction, Refinement, and Redeployment for Continual Robot Self-Improvement

arXiv:2609.35575v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The real-world performance of current vision-language-action models is fundamentally constrained by the limited coverage of expert demonstrat...

By Zhuoyuan Yu, Jiacheng Wang, Tianle Liu, Yihua Ren, Peng Yu, Chen Bai, Ziheng Zhang, Yufei Jia, Jindou Jia, Yuhang Zhang, Xinrui Zhang, Shang Yujing, Yuxiang Chen, Chuhao Zhou, Tiancai Wang, Jianfei Yang
arXiv AI
6d ago

Hide-and-Seek in Trajectories: Discovering Failure Signals for VLA Runtime Monitoring

The paper introduces Hide-and-Seek, a framework for detecting failures in Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models during robot execution. It treats failure detection as a coarsely supervised learning problem, using inter‑trajectory and intra‑trajectory contrastive objectives to localize failure‑indicative actions without step‑level annotations. Experiments on LIBERO, VLABench, and a real‑world robotic platform show that Hide‑and‑Seek achieves state‑of‑the‑art multi‑task failure detection performance across several VLA policies.

By Seongheon Park, Wendi Li, Changdae Oh, Samuel Yeh, Zsolt Kira, Michael Hagenow, Sharon Li
arXiv AI
3d ago

Learning from Runtime Feedback through Failure-Bank Self-Evolution for Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper introduces FailBank, a four‑stage self‑evolving framework that transforms runtime feedback from safety shields into lasting policy improvements for vision‑language‑action (VLA) models. By using a counterfactual correction teacher, outcome‑aware admission, and guarded LoRA updates, FailBank converts useful shield proposals into corrective targets while preserving successful actions as anchors. Experiments on the VLA‑Arena benchmark show that FailBank boosts task success rates by up to 8.5 percentage points and reduces cumulative policy cost by up to 35.6%, outperforming both base policies and traditional runtime shielding.

By Mingyue Cui, Zheyuan Liu, Yihan Zhu, Zheyuan Zhang, Meng Jiang
arXiv AI
Sep 18

HIL-UMI: Bringing Human-in-the-Loop Post-Training of Vision-Language-Action Models to Universal Manipulation Interface

HIL-UMI is a policy-guided Universal Manipulation Interface that enables robot‑free, human‑in‑the‑loop post‑training of vision‑language‑action models. By querying the current policy during handheld demonstrations and using an Energy Score to detect out‑of‑distribution states, it selectively collects new data and refines a progress‑based advantage estimator. The updated estimator then drives advantage‑conditioned behavioral cloning, improving performance on long‑horizon and precise manipulation tasks while reducing per‑frame collection time compared to HG‑DAgger.

By Zimu Han, Yiming Zeng, Jiyao Zhang, Zihao Zhao, Yuanfei Wang, Yixiang Jin, Shiqi Li, Shuangben Chen, Wei Huang, Ruodai Li, Hui Shen, Hao Dong