SEES: A Self-Evolving Embodied System via Failure-Guided VLA Policy Adaptation

Abstract

Recent vision-language-action (VLA) policies demonstrate promising generalization across diverse short-horizon tasks. However, they remain unreliable on long-horizon tasks, partly because the large-scale training data is biased toward single-stage manipulation tasks that are cheaper to demonstrate. A single weak atomic skill can cause failures across multiple multi-stage tasks. To address such failures, existing methods often require experts to identify the bottleneck and provide additional demonstrations, making the improvement costly and potentially impractical after deployment. To this end, we present a Self-Evolving Embodied System (SEES) that learns from failures and improves the VLA policy without additional expert demonstrations. SEES decomposes long-horizon tasks into atomic tasks and routes them to corresponding family policies. Each family consists of related atomic skills that share one VLA adapter. During execution, the system automatically monitors atomic-task outcomes to identify the most frequently failing atomic skills as the current bottlenecks. To overcome these bottlenecks, SEES constructs tailored RL tasks in simulation by restoring previously encountered states and generating task-specific success criteria with an LLM. Online RL updates the shared family adapters to promote positive transfer among related atomic skills and cumulative improvement across evolution rounds. Extensive experiments show that SEES can be integrated with different VLA backbones to progressively improve their long-horizon performance. We also observe continued improvement on unseen tasks, providing evidence of transfer beyond the evolution settings.