MAGMA-GEN: Validated Recovery Supervision from Ambiguous Failures via Counterfactual Re-Execution

Hierarchical robotic systems executing long-horizon manipulation tasks must make high-level semantic decisions that orchestrate stochastic low-level skills. In this setting, failed rollouts are ambiguous: a poor downstream state may reflect an invalid high-level decision, partial observation, or a valid decision whose physical execution failed. Traditional supervised learning lacks data for such recovery states, while reinforcement learning struggles with sparse rewards and non-local credit assignment. We propose MAGMA-GEN, an on-policy data-generation pipeline that converts ambiguous failed rollouts into validated recovery supervision. MAGMA-GEN first uses a privileged coach to hypothesize an early decision-level error and propose localized correction or recovery actions. Because this diagnosis is fallible, candidates are retained only if re-execution from the same state under matched conditions improves downstream progress. This produces supervised examples from the agent's own failure distribution without per-step human demonstrations. Evaluated on interactive long-horizon manipulation tasks, MAGMA-GEN improves task success and recovery capabilities, against distillation and trajectory-repair baselines under evolving task constraints in both simulation and real-robot execution.

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Publication Details

Journal
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe)
Published
2026-09-17
DOI
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2609.20056
Primary Topic
Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
Type
preprint
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MAGMA-GEN: Validated Recovery Supervision from Ambiguous Failures via Counterfactual Re-Execution

Ariane Herbulot, Matthieu Grard, Florent Lamiraux, Loan Bernat
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe)
Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
preprint

MAGMA-GEN: Validated Recovery Supervision from Ambiguous Failures via Counterfactual Re-Execution

Ariane Herbulot, Matthieu Grard, Florent Lamiraux, Loan Bernat
preprint en

Abstract

Hierarchical robotic systems executing long-horizon manipulation tasks must make high-level semantic decisions that orchestrate stochastic low-level skills. In this setting, failed rollouts are ambiguous: a poor downstream state may reflect an invalid high-level decision, partial observation, or a valid decision whose physical execution failed. Traditional supervised learning lacks data for such recovery states, while reinforcement learning struggles with sparse rewards and non-local credit assignment. We propose MAGMA-GEN, an on-policy data-generation pipeline that converts ambiguous failed rollouts into validated recovery supervision. MAGMA-GEN first uses a privileged coach to hypothesize an early decision-level error and propose localized correction or recovery actions. Because this diagnosis is fallible, candidates are retained only if re-execution from the same state under matched conditions improves downstream progress. This produces supervised examples from the agent's own failure distribution without per-step human demonstrations. Evaluated on interactive long-horizon manipulation tasks, MAGMA-GEN improves task success and recovery capabilities, against distillation and trajectory-repair baselines under evolving task constraints in both simulation and real-robot execution.

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe)
St. Raphael's Hospital (PK)
Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
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