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

Ganlong Zhao, Zijia Tang, Xingping Chen, Zhanghui Kuang, Ye Tian, Guanbin Li; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 22391-22401

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.