Remembering What Matters for Long-Horizon Robotic World Models

Abstract:Autoregressive robot video world models based on discrete visual tokens remain unreliable over long rollout horizons. Retaining the entire generated history does not necessarily improve prediction quality. We investigate a possible memory-role conflict in Full Context decoding: persistent scene information, recent visual-action states, and stale generated history compete for attention despite their different predictive roles. This perspective motivates ReCAP (Receding Context with Anchor Preservation), a training-free context-scheduling method for long-horizon robot video world models. ReCAP keeps the pretrained tokenizer, world model, and visual decoder frozen. It preserves the initial scene anchor and a contiguous window of recent complete visual-action blocks while evicting older generated history. The schedule preserves within-block structure and temporal order, requires no additional modules or parameter updates, and bounds active-context growth independently of rollout length. We evaluate ReCAP on RT-1, BridgeV2, LIBERO-90, and CALVIN using frozen autoregressive world models. Across evaluated environments and horizons, ReCAP improves visual fidelity, action-conditioned consistency, and robot structure preservation relative to Full Context. On BridgeV2, it reduces LPIPS by 63.3%. In the system benchmark at H=64, it reduces the logical KV footprint by 73.3% and p50 latency by 6.51%. Attention analyses show increased attention to retained recent states, while history interventions associate larger amounts of stale context with higher prediction error. These observations are consistent with the memory-role-conflict hypothesis, although they do not isolate it from context-length and position-handling effects. Our results support inference-time context scheduling as a practical approach to improving long-horizon robot video prediction and computational efficiency without retraining.

Robotics (cs.RO); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

arXiv:2610.14583 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.14583v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.14583 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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