Foresight: Failure Detection for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation with Action-Conditioned World Model Latents
Authors: name: Haoran Zhang, name: Yifu Lu, name: Boyang Wang, name: Xuhui Kang, name: Yen-Ling Kuo, name: Zezhou Cheng, name: Mengdi Wang, name: Odest Chadwicke Jenkins
Organization: University of Michigan

Long-horizon tasks are common in real-world robotic deployments, yet failure detection for such tasks remains underexplored. Detecting failures in long-horizon robotic tasks is particularly challenging because failure onset is often ambiguous and dense temporal annotations are typically unavailable. We present Foresight, a failure detection framework that monitors manipulation trajectories using latent representations from an action-conditioned world model. Foresight is trained using only final task-level success or failure labels. By leveraging predictive world-model embeddings, our method provides a unified framework for failure detection across different policies. We further use functional conformal prediction (FCP) to calibrate detection thresholds adaptively. We evaluate Foresight with state-of-the-art vision-language-action policies in simulation on LIBERO-Long, ManiSkill-Long, and BEHAVIOR-1K, compare it against state-of-the-artfailure detection methods, and validate it on real robots with three long-horizon tasks on a ReactorX-200 arm and one task on a Franka arm. Our results suggest that action-conditioned world-model embeddings provide a scalable representation for reliable failure monitoring in long-horizon manipulation.