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arXiv · 2510.24680

InFeR: Informed Failure Resilience in Learned Visual Navigation Control

Zishuo Wang·Joel Loo·David Hsu
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Abstract

While imitation learning (IL) has enabled successful visual navigation in many common environments, IL policies are prone to unpredictable failures under out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. This necessitates failure-resilient policies, which not only detect failures, but also recognise their sources and recover from them autonomously. We propose InFeR, a general framework for building IL policies with informed failure resilience without failure or recovery demonstrations. InFeR retrains an IL policy with a Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB) loss to structure its latent space for OOD failure detection. It applies a visual explainability technique, Grad-CAM, to localise an image region as the source of failure and inform a heuristic policy for recovery. All these are achieved without requiring additional training data. Real-world experiments show that InFeR enables informed failure recovery across two different policy architectures, yielding robust long-range navigation in complex environments.

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Zishuo Wang, Joel Loo, David Hsu. 2025-10-28. InFeR: Informed Failure Resilience in Learned Visual Navigation Control. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.24680

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