Failing Forward: Adaptive Failure-Informed Learning for Vision-Language-Action Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08434v2
• Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 15:21:07 GMT
• Title: Failing Forward: Adaptive Failure-Informed Learning for Vision-Language-Action Models
• Abstract summary: We propose an end-to-end framework that leverages failure trajectories as adaptive negative guidance for diffusion- and flow-based VLA policies.<n>AFIL uses a pretrained VLA to generate failure rollouts online, avoiding the need for handcrafted failure-mode design.<n>It then jointly trains Dual Action Generators (DAGs) for successful and failed behaviors while sharing a common vision-language backbone.
• Score: 32.87104367896446
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide a promising paradigm for scalable robotic manipulation, yet their reliance on success-only behavioral cloning leaves them brittle; lacking corrective training signals, minor execution errors rapidly compound into unrecoverable, out-of-distribution failures. To address this limitation, we propose Adaptive Failure-Informed Learning (AFIL), an end-to-end framework that leverages failure trajectories as adaptive negative guidance for diffusion- and flow-based VLA policies. AFIL uses a pretrained VLA to generate failure rollouts online, avoiding the need for handcrafted failure-mode design or human-in-the-loop recovery. It then jointly trains Dual Action Generators (DAGs) for successful and failed behaviors while sharing a common vision-language backbone, enabling efficient failure-aware policy learning with limited parameter overhead. During sampling, the failure generator adaptively steers action generation away from failure-prone regions and toward more reliable success modes, with guidance strength determined by the per-diffusion-step distance between success and failure distributions. Experiments across in-domain and out-of-domain robotic manipulation tasks, covering both short- and long-horizon settings, show that AFIL consistently improves task success rates and robustness over existing VLA baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness, efficiency, and generality.

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