Learning Robust Execution in Robotic Manipulation with Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) or World Action (WAM) models have recently demonstrated remarkable performance in robotic manipulation. On LIBERO, SOTA method have achieved nearly 100% success rates, seemingly suggesting that the models are ready for deployment in real world. However, near perfect performance on existing benchmarks can be misleading: success under ideal conditions does not imply real world robustness. Existing benchmarks primarily evaluate task completion from predefined initial states, while real world interactions inevitably involve failures such as failed grasps, collisions, and unintended object movements. A robot must therefore not only execute tasks successfully, but also recognize and recover from failures to continue the task. Yet this capability remains largely unmeasured, revealing a critical gap between benchmark performance and real world reliability. To address this gap, we introduce LIBERO-Recover Benchmark, a large scale benchmark for failure recovery in robotic manipulation. Built upon LIBERO, we collect real execution failures from SOTA embodied models and construct 1,000+ scenarios across four recovery levels: (1) Action Retry, (2) Action Adaptation, (3) Object State Recovery, and (4) Environmental Recovery. We evaluate four core capabilities: spatial understanding, object structure reasoning, interaction understanding, and topological reasoning. As the first large-scale benchmark for embodied failure recovery, LIBERO-Recover shifts evaluation from \emph{Can the robot succeed?''} to \emph{Can the robot recover after failure?''}, promoting robust and generalizable embodied agents. The project will be avaible in \textcolor{blue}{https://liulin815.github.io/LIBERO-Recovery/}.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies achieve strong performance in robotic manipulation but remain brittle once execution deviates from nominal trajectories. We propose CARE (Corrective Atomic Robotic Execution), a framework that improves recovery by learning from failures encountered during execution. Instead of generating corrective data from manually designed or random perturbations, CARE collects failed rollouts, models stage-conditioned post-failure deviations, and uses the resulting empirical distributions to synthesize representative failure states and corrective demonstrations. At inference time, CARE combines stage-wise planning with physically grounded 3D monitoring to trigger atomic adjustments or re-operations while preserving task progress. We further introduce the Failure State Recovery Benchmark (FSR-Bench), which evaluates recovery from intermediate failure states under local deviations and structural anomalies. Experiments across multiple VLA backbones, simulation benchmarks, and real-world dual-arm tasks show consistent improvements, with average task-success gains of 14.5 points in simulation and 15.9 points in the real world. Code, models, and data are available at https://github.com/xiaojunlan/care

Robotic manipulation has increasingly adopted vision-language-action (VLA) models, which achieve strong performance but typically require task-specific demonstrations and fine-tuning, and often generalize poorly under domain shift. We investigate whether general-purpose large language model (LLM) agent frameworks, originally developed for software engineering, can serve as an alternative control paradigm for embodied manipulation. We introduce FAEA (Frontier Agent as Embodied Agent), which applies an LLM agent framework directly to embodied manipulation without modification. Using the same iterative reasoning that enables software agents to debug code, FAEA enables embodied agents to reason through manipulation strategies. We evaluate an unmodified frontier agent, Claude Agent SDK, across the LIBERO, ManiSkill3, and MetaWorld benchmarks. With privileged environment state access, FAEA achieves success rates of 84.9%, 85.7%, and 96%, respectively. This level of task success approaches that of VLA models trained with less than 100 demonstrations per task, without requiring demonstrations or fine-tuning. With one round of human feedback as an optional optimization, performance increases to 88.2% on LIBERO. This demonstration-free capability has immediate practical value: FAEA can autonomously explore novel scenarios in simulation and generate successful trajectories for training data augmentation in embodied learning. Our results indicate that general-purpose agents are sufficient for a class of manipulation tasks dominated by deliberative, task-level planning. This opens a path for robotics systems to leverage actively maintained agent infrastructure and benefit directly from ongoing advances in frontier models. Code is available at https://github.com/robiemusketeer/faea-sim