Fare: Failure Resilience in Learned Visual Navigation Control

Abstract: While imitation learning (IL) enables effective visual navigation, IL policies are prone to unpredictable failures in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. We advance the notion of failure-resilient policies, which not only detect failures but also recover from them automatically. Failure recognition that identifies the factors causing failure is key to informing recovery: e.g. pinpointing image regions triggering failure detections can provide cues to guide recovery. We present Fare, a framework to construct failure-resilient IL policies, embedding OOD-detection and recognition in them without using explicit failure data, and pairing them with recovery heuristics. Real-world experiments show that Fare enables failure recovery across two different policy architectures, enabling robust long-range navigation in complex environments.