RoboDuo: Attempt, Check and Atomic Recovery through Code for Vision-Language-Action Models

Abstract

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models map a language instruction and the current observation directly to actions, without checking whether the instruction has been completed. For long-horizon tasks, a single failed step therefore goes unnoticed and leaves the whole task unfinished. Such failed episodes, however, often end with the task partially complete. Moreover, the unfinished steps are reusable atomic skills that recur across demonstrations. A failed attempt can thus be recovered by composing with atomic skills. We propose RoboDuo, a closed-loop dual-system framework that uses code as the interface between a coding agent and two VLAs. The agent writes a program that lets a full-task VLA attempt the whole task and checks whether it is complete; on failure, an atomic VLA finishes the remaining steps. Since the agent emits no actions and only decides which VLA for execution, RoboDuo wraps an existing full-task VLA without updating its weights. To train the atomic VLA and the coding agent with the completion-checking ability, we build LIBERO-Atomic, LIBERO-Code, and LIBERO-Judge from a single set of LIBERO demonstrations. RoboDuo consistently improves X-VLA and $π_{0.5}$ on LIBERO and LIBERO-PRO, with the largest gains on long-horizon tasks, and recovers failed rollouts of a frozen full-task VLA on a real robot.