ForkCast: Predictive Recovery for Vision-Language-Action Policies via Counterfactual Futures

Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies perform manipulation tasks using camera images and language instructions, but object slip or visual occlusion can disrupt execution. Recovery is typically learned during policy training or delegated to a monitor that triggers a scripted repair after detecting a failure. We introduce ForkCast, a predictive recovery framework that compares counterfactual futures to determine whether and how to intervene in a frozen VLA policy. At each decision point, ForkCast evaluates three candidates: executing the policy's nominal action chunk (Commit), adjusting the camera viewpoint (Reobserve), and replanning the arm trajectory (Replan). A candidate-conditioned world model forecasts the latent outcome of each candidate at a common future horizon, and a shared task-progress head scores the predicted outcomes. By evaluating the policy's own continuation alongside the repair candidates, a single comparison based on task progress determines both whether and how to intervene, without a failure detector, an intervention threshold, or updates to the VLA backbone. On five simulated RoboTwin 2.0 tasks with injected occlusion and object slip, ForkCast increases pooled success from 13.3% for the frozen $π_{0.5}$ policy to 30.0% and transfers to two additional VLA backbones without updating ForkCast. After adaptation on real-robot candidate rollouts, ForkCast also improves success over the base policy under both clean and visibility-limited conditions. Code will be released to benefit the research community.