Scaling up Memory for Robotic Control via Experience Retrieval

Ajay Sridhar, Jennifer Pan, Satvik Sharma, Chelsea Finn

Keywords: Robot Learning, Memory, Vision-Language-Action Models

TL;DR: We enable existing vision-language-action models (VLAs) to solve long-horizon tasks that require minutes of memory by finetuning a VLM to act like a high-level planner and select task-relevant keyframes.

Abstract: Humans rely on memory to perform tasks; our goal is to endow robot policies with the same ability. Naively conditioning on long observation histories is computationally expensive and brittle under covariate shift, while indiscriminate subsampling of history leads to irrelevant or redundant information. We propose a hierarchical policy framework, where the high-level policy is trained to select and track previous task-relevant keyframes from its experience. The high-level policy uses selected keyframes and the most recent frames when generating text instructions for a low-level policy to execute. This design is compatible with existing vision-language-action (VLA) models and enables the system to efficiently reason over long-horizon dependencies. In our experiments, we fine-tune Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct and $\pi_{0.5}$ as the high-level and low-level policies respectively, using demonstrations supplemented with minimal language annotations. Our approach, MemER, outperforms prior methods on three real-world long-horizon robotic manipulation tasks that require minutes of memory. Videos and code can be found at https://jen-pan.github.io/memer/.

Primary Area: applications to robotics, autonomy, planning

Submission Number: 23612