Beyond Short-Horizon: VQ-Memory for Robust Long-Horizon Manipulation in Non-Markovian Simulation Benchmarks

TL;DR

This paper introduces RuleSafe, a new non-Markovian manipulation benchmark with diverse locking tasks, and VQ-Memory, a structured temporal encoding method that improves long-horizon planning and generalization in robotic simulation.

Contribution

The paper presents VQ-Memory, a novel vector-quantized temporal representation, and RuleSafe, a complex manipulation benchmark, advancing long-horizon robotic manipulation in non-Markovian settings.

Findings

VQ-Memory improves long-horizon planning accuracy.

Enhances generalization to unseen configurations.

Reduces computational cost in manipulation tasks.

Abstract

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