Repurposing a VLA’s vision encoder to emit one action-supervised memory token per historical frame-view yields long-horizon manipulation with large success gains and low latency.
HELM: Harness-Enhanced Long-horizon Memory for Vision-Language-Action Manipulation
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abstract
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models fail systematically on long-horizon manipulation tasks despite strong short-horizon performance. We show that this failure is not resolved by extending context length alone in the current reactive execution setting; instead, it stems from three recurring execution-loop deficiencies: the memory gap, the verification gap, and the recovery gap. We present HELM, a model-agnostic framework that addresses these deficiencies with three components: an Episodic Memory Module (EMM) that retrieves key task history via CLIP-indexed keyframes, a learned State Verifier (SV) that predicts action failure before execution from observation, action, subgoal, and memory-conditioned context, and a Harness Controller (HC) that performs rollback and replanning. The SV is the core learning contribution: it consistently outperforms rule-based feasibility checks and ensemble uncertainty baselines, and its effectiveness depends critically on access to episodic memory. On LIBERO-LONG, HELM improves task success rate by 23.1 percentage points over OpenVLA (58.4% to 81.5%), while extending the context window to H=32 yields only a 5.4-point gain and same-budget LoRA adaptation remains 12.2 points below HELM. HELM also improves long-horizon performance on CALVIN and substantially boosts recovery success under controlled perturbations. Ablations and mechanism analyses isolate the contribution of each component, and we release LIBERO-Recovery as a perturbation-injection protocol for evaluating failure recovery in long-horizon manipulation.
years
2026 2representative citing papers
Adding recurrent memory tokens to VLA models raises success rates on partially observable manipulation tasks from 0.42 to 0.84 on training and 0.07 to 0.23 on held-out tasks while preserving performance under full observability.
citing papers explorer
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NativeMEM: Native Memory Compression for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation
Repurposing a VLA’s vision encoder to emit one action-supervised memory token per historical frame-view yields long-horizon manipulation with large success gains and low latency.
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$\mu$VLA: On Recurrent Memory for Partially Observable Manipulation in VLA Models
Adding recurrent memory tokens to VLA models raises success rates on partially observable manipulation tasks from 0.42 to 0.84 on training and 0.07 to 0.23 on held-out tasks while preserving performance under full observability.