arXiv Machine Learning

Self-Refining Vision Language Model for Robotic Failure Detection and Reasoning

The paper introduces ARMOR, an Adaptive Round-based Multi-task Model designed for robotic failure detection and reasoning. It treats detection and reasoning as a self‑refinement process, iteratively predicting outcomes and natural language explanations conditioned on prior outputs. Training leverages both large sparse binary labels and small rich reasoning annotations through offline and online imitation learning, while inference uses multiple refinement trajectories and a self‑certainty metric to select the best prediction.

arXiv AI
Jul 28

Unified Embodied VLM Reasoning with Robotic Action via Autoregressive Discretized Pre-training

arXiv:2512. 24125v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: General-purpose robotic systems operating in open-world environments must achieve both broad generalization and high-precision action execution, a combination that remains challenging for existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.

By Yi Liu, Sukai Wang, Dafeng Wei, Xiaowei Cai, Linqing Zhong, Jiange Yang, Guanghui Ren, Jinyu Zhang, Maoqing Yao, Chuankang Li, Xindong He, Liliang Chen, Jianlan Luo
arXiv AI
Sep 30

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
Jul 28

A Few Words Go a Long Way: Language Guided Robot Policy Synthesis

arXiv:2607. 23784v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While vision-language-action models have demonstrated impressive zero-shot manipulation capabilities, they remain fundamentally black box policies that are difficult to interpret, adapt, or correct when they inevitably fail.

By Daphne Chen, Archit Ritesh Jain, Eric Goossen, Emma Romig, Michael Murray, Nick Walker, Maya Cakmak
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 5

Uncertainty Quantification for Flow-Based Generalist Robot Policies

The paper introduces a method for quantifying epistemic uncertainty in flow‑matching based generalist robot policies, such as vision‑language‑action models and world‑action models. By measuring velocity‑field disagreement across a small ensemble, the authors obtain better‑calibrated uncertainty estimates that can detect deployment failures and guide active fine‑tuning. Their SAVE approach reduces the need for expert demonstrations, improving real‑world task success from 39 % to 47 % while maintaining a fixed demonstration budget.

By Ralf R\"omer, Maximilian Seeliger, Saida Liu, Ben Sturgis, Marco Bagatella, Daniel Marta, Andreas Krause, Angela P. Schoellig
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Do Vision-Language-Action Models Mean What They Say? On the Role of Faithfulness in Embodied Reasoning

arXiv:2607. 04681v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embodied Chain-of-Thought has emerged as a promising mechanism to enhance robot decision-making and interpretability in black-box Vision-Language Action (VLA) models.

By Matthew Foutter, Matteo Cercola, Lena Wild, Yunshan Wang, Michelle Li, Daniele Gammelli, Marco Pavone
arXiv AI
Sep 28

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