Value as Memory: Online Value-Guided Post-training for General Robot Policies
Wenye Yu, Yijin Chen, Kaiyi Xiong, Wenbo Han, Wendi Chen, Yang Jin, Han Xue, Jun Lv, Cewu Lu, Chuan Wen · 2026 arXiv · PDF
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.
TL;DR
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).