AURA: Action-Gated Memory for Robot Policies at Constant VRAM

--> Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2606.02775 (cs) [Submitted on 1 Jun 2026] Title: AURA: Action-Gated Memory for Robot Policies at Constant VRAM Authors: Josef Chen View a PDF of the paper titled AURA: Action-Gated Memory for Robot Policies at Constant VRAM, by Josef Chen View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract: The KV-cache is the right memory for datacenters but the wrong memory for robots. Datacenter inference batches many short requests and resets them, amortizing an attention cache across a crowd. Embodied agents instead run one long, non-resetting episode on bandwidth-limited edge hardware, where high-bandwidth memory and flash are scarce, flash has finite write endurance, and memory writes rather than compute can become the binding constraint. AURA-Mem (Action-Utility Recurrent Adaptive Memory) targets this regime. It wraps a frozen vision-language-action backbone with a constant-size recurrent memory and a learned gate that writes only when the current observation would change the next action: memory that knows when to stay silent. Unlike reconstruction-based memory, the gate is trained directly against a closed-loop action-error signal. Its inference state is fixed at 4,224 bytes regardless of horizon, while a KV-cache grows to 6,061 times larger at 100,000 steps. On a controlled synthetic benchmark, AURA-Mem matches the best O(1) baseline in accuracy while using 5.19-6.13 times fewer writes, and up to 9.19 times fewer writes on easier configurations. Budget-matched random and periodic schedules do not recover this gain, isolating the benefit to the action-surprise signal. On a trained closed-loop OpenVLA-OFT 7B panel on LIBERO-Long (n=60 episodes per arm), the gate does not hurt success: AURA-Mem matches the ungated base policy (0.233) and slightly exceeds an always-write KV arm (0.217), while using 7.0 times fewer writes and constant memory. We also instantiate an approximate-information-state value-loss bound as a methodology demonstration; at this scale, the bound is vacuous rather than a guarantee. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) ; Hardware Architecture (cs.AR); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Performance (cs.PF); Robotics (cs.RO) Cite as: arXiv:2606.02775 [cs.AI] (or arXiv:2606.02775v1 [cs.AI] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.02775 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Josef Liyanjun Chen [ view email ] [v1] Mon, 1 Jun 2026 18:38:21 UTC (6,515 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled AURA: Action-Gated Memory for Robot Policies at Constant VRAM, by Josef Chen View PDF HTML (experimental) TeX Source view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev | next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.AR cs.DC cs.PF cs.RO References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer ( What is the Explorer? ) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers ( What is Connected Papers? ) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps ( What is Litmaps? ) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations ( What are Smart Citations? ) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv ( What is alphaXiv? ) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers ( What is CatalyzeX? ) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub ( What is DagsHub? ) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub ( What is GotitPub? ) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face ( What is Huggingface? ) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast ( What is ScienceCast? ) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate ( What is Replicate? ) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces ( What is Spaces? ) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI ( What is TXYZ.AI? ) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower ( What are Influence Flowers? ) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender ( What is CORE? ) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs . Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax ( What is MathJax? )