Value as Memory: Online Value-Guided Post-training for General Robot Policies

Abstract:Real-world post-training of generalist robot policies faces two challenges: partial observability makes action selection ambiguous, while offline post-training methods delay feedback from deployment experience. We present Value as Memory (VaM), a framework that addresses these challenges through value caching and online real-world reinforcement learning (RL). Value caching conditions actions on recent value predictions as task-progress memory, while online updates enable timely policy improvement by combining offline demonstrations, off-policy interventions, and on-policy rollouts for sample-efficient adaptation. As a result, VaM transitions from offline RL warmup to online autonomous learning with sparse rewards. Across long-horizon tasks involving deformable objects and contact-rich manipulation, VaM yields a mean absolute success-rate gain of $29.4\%$ with value caching, while achieving a $32.8\%$ gain with online autonomous learning over matched offline training. The evaluated online schedule performs $8\times$ as many policy iterations under the same gradient-step budget, with more than $2\times$ lower recorded time per gradient step with concurrent data collection and training.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.22368 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.22368v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.22368 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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