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arXiv · 2604.25161

Where Did It Go Wrong? Capability-Oriented Failure Attribution for Vision-and-Language Navigation Agents

Jianming Chen·Yawen Wang·Junjie Wang·Xiaofei Xie·Shoubin Li·Qing Wang·Fanjiang Xu
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Abstract

Embodied agents in safety-critical applications such as Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) rely on multiple interdependent capabilities (e.g., perception, memory, planning, decision), making failures difficult to localize and attribute. Existing testing methods are largely system-level and provide limited insight into which capability deficiencies cause task failures. We propose a capability-oriented testing approach that enables failure detection and attribution by combining (1) adaptive test case generation via seed selection and mutation, (2) capability oracles for identifying capability-specific errors, and (3) a feedback mechanism that attributes failures to capabilities and guides further test generation. Experiments show that our method discovers more failure cases and more accurately pinpoints capability-level deficiencies than state-of-the-art baselines, providing more interpretable and actionable guidance for improving embodied agents.

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Jianming Chen, Yawen Wang, Junjie Wang, Xiaofei Xie, Shoubin Li, Qing Wang, Fanjiang Xu. 2026-04-28. Where Did It Go Wrong? Capability-Oriented Failure Attribution for Vision-and-Language Navigation Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25161

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