Is Your Robot's Memory Just a Clock? Temporal Shortcuts in Memory-Augmented VLA Policies
Overview
This research paper investigates temporal shortcuts in memory-augmented vision-language-action (VLA) policies. The authors demonstrate that relying on elapsed time rather than event counts leads to 'phantom progress,' where robots incorrectly interpret pauses or null events as task completion. Experiments on the RoboMME benchmark show this vulnerability reduces success rates significantly. The study proposes indexing memory by events instead of clock ticks as an effective solution, which recovers substantial performance without requiring model retraining.
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“RoboMME, we make the robot briefly pause or fidget its wrist. Such a null event changes nothing the task depends on, yet a released memory VLA counts the interval as work done and stops early. We call this failure phantom progress. It cuts success from 47 to 16 of 50 on one task and from 44 to 10 on the other. When the same frames are withheld from memory, success returns, so the cause lies in memory rather than in t”
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- arXiv Robotics — research abstractsSignalIs Your Robot's Memory Just a Clock? Temporal Shortcuts in Memory-Augmented VLA Policies
This research paper investigates temporal shortcuts in memory-augmented vision-language-action (VLA) policies. The authors demonstrate that relying on elapsed time rather than event counts leads to 'phantom progress,' where robots incorrectly interpret pauses or null events as task completion. Experiments on the RoboMME benchmark show this vulnerability reduces success rates significantly. The study proposes indexing memory by events instead of clock ticks as an effective solution, which recovers substantial performance without requiring model retraining.
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