TempoFit: Plug-and-Play Layer-Wise Temporal KV Memory for Long-Horizon Vision-Language-Action Manipulation

TL;DR

TempoFit introduces a training-free, layer-wise memory mechanism for vision-language-action policies, significantly enhancing long-horizon manipulation performance without retraining or increasing inference latency.

Contribution

It proposes TempoFit, a novel method that reuses existing model components for memory, enabling long-term context integration in frozen pretrained policies.

Findings

Improves success rate by up to 4.0% on LIBERO-LONG.

Maintains near-real-time inference latency.

Transfers effectively to other tasks and robots.

Abstract

Pretrained Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies have achieved strong single-step manipulation, but their inference remains largely memoryless, which is brittle in non-Markovian long-horizon settings with occlusion, state aliasing, and subtle post-action changes. Prior approaches inject history either by stacking frames, which scales visual tokens and latency while adding near-duplicate pixels, or by learning additional temporal interfaces that require (re-)training and may break the original single-frame inference graph. We present TempoFit, a training-free temporal retrofit that upgrades frozen VLAs through state-level memory. Our key insight is that prefix attention K/V already form a model-native, content-addressable runtime state; reusing them across timesteps introduces history without new tokens or trainable modules. TempoFit stores layer-wise FIFO prefix K/V at selected intermediate layers, performs parameter-free K-to-K retrieval with Frame-Gap Temporal Bias (FGTB), a fixed recency bias inspired by positional biases in NLP, to keep decisions present-dominant, and injects the retrieved context via pre-attention residual loading with norm-preserving rescaling to avoid distribution shift under frozen weights. On LIBERO-LONG, TempoFit improves strong pretrained backbones by up to +4.0% average success rate while maintaining near-real-time latency, and it transfers consistently to CALVIN and real-robot long-horizon tasks.