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

Zhuoyuan Yu, Jiacheng Wang, Tianle Liu, Yihua Ren, Peng Yu +11

The real-world performance of current vision-language-action models is fundamentally constrained by the limited coverage of expert demonstrations and their insufficient understanding of physical interactions. A common remedy is to collect additional real-world demonstrations of newly encountered failures. However, this process is costly, inefficient, potentially unsafe, and difficult to scale. To address this challenge, we propose Failure for Rising (F4R), a failure-driven real-to-sim-to-real closed-loop learning framework that converts real-world failures into targeted policy improvement. F4R first uses an agent to automatically identify and diagnose failures from rollouts. It reconstructs each failure as an interactive, object-centric table-top environment that preserves the task-relevant spatial and physical conditions. The policy is then refined through failure-conditioned sim-real co-training followed by targeted reinforcement learning in the reconstructed environments. The improved policy is subsequently redeployed, while newly observed failures are continuously fed back into the next reconstruction and learning cycle. Real-world evaluations on four manipulation tasks show…