gamma: grounded multi-agent memory with mechanical audit for memory-intensive manipulation

Pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) policies fail on memory tasks, behaviour that depends on events observed long before the current frame, because their training data is overwhelmingly Markov and mapping episodic memory directly to action chunks is hard. Yet the same policy, finetuned once to follow a privileged oracle's grounded-subgoal text, nearly solves these tasks: the difficulty lies entirely in mapping memory to a grounded symbolic subgoal. Existing work entrusts this stage to a single VLM that selects keyframes and reasons over raw frames, and falls far short of the oracle: key identities and dynamics are buried in noisy pixels, the reasoning spans hundreds of frames in an unbounded context, and hallucination corrupts the memory itself. We instead present GAMMA (Grounded multi-Agent Memory with Mechanical Audit), which builds the stage as a collaborating two-agent memory system: a detector tool (SAM-3) for spatial grounding, a VLM writer that distils each replan window into one grounded text line, an append-only text memory bank, and a VLM reasoner that reads the bank and emits the next grounded subgoal at the oracle's cadence, wrapped in a propose-verify harness that admits, defers, corrects, or rejects every agent claim against mechanical visual evidence, at training-corpus construction and at deployment alike. On a sixteen-task memory-manipulation suite GAMMA recovers a large fraction of the oracle ceiling with the policy held fixed, reaching the ceiling on several tasks, and transfers with unchanged contracts to a second benchmark.

Authors

Institutions

Publication Details

Published
2026-10-26
DOI
https://doi.org/10.66977/xsci.2610.002q
Primary Topic
Robot Manipulation and Learning
Type
preprint
Controls
|||
ALL TIME
JAN
FEB
MAR
APR
MAY
JUN
JUL
AUG
SEP
OCT
preprint

gamma: grounded multi-agent memory with mechanical audit for memory-intensive manipulation

Yudong Liu
Robot Manipulation and Learning
preprint

gamma: grounded multi-agent memory with mechanical audit for memory-intensive manipulation

Yudong Liu
preprint en

Abstract

Pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) policies fail on memory tasks, behaviour that depends on events observed long before the current frame, because their training data is overwhelmingly Markov and mapping episodic memory directly to action chunks is hard. Yet the same policy, finetuned once to follow a privileged oracle's grounded-subgoal text, nearly solves these tasks: the difficulty lies entirely in mapping memory to a grounded symbolic subgoal. Existing work entrusts this stage to a single VLM that selects keyframes and reasons over raw frames, and falls far short of the oracle: key identities and dynamics are buried in noisy pixels, the reasoning spans hundreds of frames in an unbounded context, and hallucination corrupts the memory itself. We instead present GAMMA (Grounded multi-Agent Memory with Mechanical Audit), which builds the stage as a collaborating two-agent memory system: a detector tool (SAM-3) for spatial grounding, a VLM writer that distils each replan window into one grounded text line, an append-only text memory bank, and a VLM reasoner that reads the bank and emits the next grounded subgoal at the oracle's cadence, wrapped in a propose-verify harness that admits, defers, corrects, or rejects every agent claim against mechanical visual evidence, at training-corpus construction and at deployment alike. On a sixteen-task memory-manipulation suite GAMMA recovers a large fraction of the oracle ceiling with the policy held fixed, reaching the ceiling on several tasks, and transfers with unchanged contracts to a second benchmark.

Duke University (US)
Robot Manipulation and Learning
AI Navigator

Ask Laika to Summarize, Analyze, and Connect papers live on the map.

Summarize Papers & Methodologies

Extract key findings, datasets, and comparative methods across publications.

Benchmark Rankings & Visual Analytics

Rank top research institutions, authors, funders, topics, and journals by Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) and paper volume with instant charts.

Connect Distant Disciplines

Bridge topological clusters on the map to find hidden collaborative intersections.

Laika access coming soon