The paper investigates how different sensing channels help diagnose failures in a simulated bimanual tool‑use task. It finds that a tool’s slip is best detected by the tool hand, while the identity of the late hand can be inferred from both arms but not reliably from a single hand’s sensor. A repair policy that escalates when the cause is unclear can fix as many failures as one that knows the exact cause within two attempts.
By Baptiste Bonin, Caro Strickland, Audrey Durand
arXiv:2606. 03134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Imitation-learning policies for robot manipulation inherit the quality of the success labels attached to their training episodes, and those labels are usually produced by the robot's own success check.
By Aarav Bedi (University of California, Berkeley)
arXiv:2609.21942v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: A robot that fails at a task faces the first decision in corrective dialogue: act on its own diagnosis, consult another onboard sensor, or interrupt...
By Eshika Pathak, Leela Krishna
arXiv:2610.32941v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models perform well on robotic manipulation, yet remain brittle once their own actions carry them into states their trai...
By Thomas Landeg, Thierry Tambe
arXiv:2606. 08542v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Exploratory manipulation often turns an apparent failed attempt into the key evidence for what to do next.
By Haizhou Ge, Yufei Jia, Yue Li, Zhixing Chen, Lu Shi, Lei Han, Guyue Zhou, Ruqi Huang
The study investigates why small language model agents tend to repeat a tool call that just failed. By recording the failed call and its error message in the transcript, the authors measure a negative corrective gain—agents are more likely to repeat the failed action, with a drop of about 1.03 nats per token. The problem is traced to the harness design rather than the model’s understanding of errors, and the authors show that replacing the verbatim call with a runtime-generated description of the failure can reduce this backfiring effect by 76%.
By Esmail Gumaan
arXiv:2610.10388v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Recent advances in multimodal foundation models have made them capable generalist physical agents for a range of manipulation tasks. However, success...
By Liu Renhang, Navonil Majumder, Tej Deep Pala, Soujanya Poria
The study investigates how language models equipped with tools can still produce unsupported final claims, even when a single tool call could resolve the uncertainty. It defines two metrics—occurrence (how often unsupported claims arise) and conditional repair (how often they are fixed when evidence is provided). Experiments on Qwen3-32B and Gemma 4 show that providing the missing evidence consistently repairs all unsupported claims in the Qwen3-32B setup, while the Gemma 4 model never produced unsupported claims under the tested conditions.
By Justin Bronder
The paper investigates whether a single descriptive sentence can correct failures in frozen vision‑language‑action (VLA) policies. By labeling failures in the LIBERO‑90 benchmark, the authors identify four failure modes, finding that only execution misalignment—where the policy reaches the correct target but misjudges distance or force—can be remedied with a concise human‑generated sentence. This sentence, parsed by an LLM into a bias on the policy’s actions, successfully restores performance on both simulated and real‑world tasks, while automated language models fail to achieve similar gains.
By Owen Kwon, Pablo Ortega-Kral, Arthur Bucker, Jean Oh
arXiv:2609.36808v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Current embodied models do not respond to their own failures, although what just went wrong could inform a small adjustment on the next attempt, the...
By Long Li, Qichao Zhao, Yue Yang, Fan Xu, Zhe Wang, Alan Wee-Chung Liew, Chao Qu, Heng Tao Shen, Shirui Pan
Current embodied models do not respond to their own failures, although what just went wrong could inform a small adjustment on the next attempt, the kind of reflection behind the gains of thinking in...
arXiv:2609.22299v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: When a robot faces unfamiliar physical conditions, a common approach is to collect evidence about what changed and adapt. For such diagnosis to impro...
By Zhengshu Zhang