Beyond Short-Horizon: VQ-Memory for Robust Long-Horizon Manipulation in Non-Markovian Simulation Benchmarks
This addresses the problem of limited simulation benchmarks for complex robotic manipulation tasks, offering a scalable solution for researchers, though it is incremental in building upon existing VLA models.
The paper tackles the lack of benchmarks for non-Markovian, long-horizon robotic manipulation tasks by introducing RuleSafe, a new benchmark with diverse unlocking mechanisms, and proposes VQ-Memory, a temporal representation that improves planning and generalization in state-of-the-art models, achieving enhanced performance with reduced computational cost.
The high cost of collecting real-robot data has made robotic simulation a scalable platform for both evaluation and data generation. Yet most existing benchmarks concentrate on simple manipulation tasks such as pick-and-place, failing to capture the non-Markovian characteristics of real-world tasks and the complexity of articulated object interactions. To address this limitation, we present RuleSafe, a new articulated manipulation benchmark built upon a scalable LLM-aided simulation framework. RuleSafe features safes with diverse unlocking mechanisms, such as key locks, password locks, and logic locks, which require different multi-stage reasoning and manipulation strategies. These LLM-generated rules produce non-Markovian and long-horizon tasks that require temporal modeling and memory-based reasoning. We further propose VQ-Memory, a compact and structured temporal representation that uses vector-quantized variational autoencoders (VQ-VAEs) to encode past proprioceptive states into discrete latent tokens. This representation filters low-level noise while preserving high-level task-phase context, providing lightweight yet robust temporal cues that are compatible with existing Vision-Language-Action models (VLA). Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art VLA models and diffusion policies show that VQ-Memory consistently improves long-horizon planning, enhances generalization to unseen configurations, and enables more efficient manipulation with reduced computational cost. Project page: vqmemory.github.io