FailureSpot: Label-Efficient Timestamp-Level Failure Detection for Vision-Language-Action Models

Abstract

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies have shown strong potential for general-purpose robotic manipulation, but they can still fail unpredictably during long-horizon execution, making reliable failure detection essential for safe deployment. Existing methods either rely on visual models that typically detect failures only after erroneous actions have occurred, or use lightweight proactive detectors trained on VLA internal representations. However, these proactive methods are often supervised with trajectory-level labels, causing normal pre-failure behavior in unsuccessful trajectories to be incorrectly labeled as failure. This supervision mismatch introduces label noise and limits both trajectory-level detection accuracy and precise timestamp-level failure localization. In this work, we study fine-grained timestamp-level VLA failure detection while addressing the cost of dense annotation. We propose a data-efficient framework that first leverages unlabeled VLA action chunks to construct action-derived weak supervision signals, capturing abnormal patterns such as inconsistent consecutive chunks, frozen or idle actions, and aggressive random motions. We then use active learning to select only the most uncertain trajectories for timestamp-level annotation and fine-tune the detector with these informative labels. Experiments across multiple VLA policies show that our method improves both timestamp-level and trajectory-level failure detection performance.