ReTrace: Cross-Stage Failure Attribution for Self-Improving Robotic Manipulation

General-purpose multimodal foundation models are increasingly capable of directly controlling robots, yet improving their manipulation capabilities through autonomous interaction remains challenging. A key challenge to such self-improvement is learning from failures in complex manipulation tasks involving cross-stage dependencies, where an action may succeed locally but cause a later stage to fail. To address this challenge, we introduce ReTrace, a self-improvement framework for robotic manipulation through autonomous physical interaction and retrospective reasoning, without provided demonstrations or model-parameter updates. ReTrace retrospectively traces downstream failures to earlier decisions, proposes targeted corrections, and evaluates them through subsequent interactions. Across attempts, ReTrace progressively consolidates validated corrections into a reusable manipulation skill that guide subsequent execution. We evaluate ReTrace on four real-world manipulation tasks using a Franka Research 3 robot. On the two tasks with strong cross-stage dependencies, GPT-6 Astra-low improves from 0% to 80% success on plug insertion and from 0% to 100% on ball pouring, while GPT-6 Sol-xhigh improves from 0% to 10% and 0% to 90%, respectively. The learned skills also transfer across model and reasoning configurations and reduce inference-time decision cost in most evaluated settings.