# Learning to Actively Reduce Memory Requirements for Robot Control Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.07451 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07451/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Aug 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Computing Complexity-aware Plans Using Kolmogorov Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10303/) (2021)
- [Tight Constraint Prediction of Six-Degree-of-Freedom Transformer-based Powered Descent Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00930/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Robots equipped with rich sensing modalities (e.g., RGB-D cameras) performing long-horizon tasks motivate the need for policies that are highly memory-efficient. State-of-the-art approaches for controlling robots often use memory representations that are excessively rich for the task or rely on hand-crafted tricks for memory efficiency. Instead, this work provides a general approach for jointly synthesizing memory representations and policies; the resulting policies actively seek to reduce memory requirements. Specifically, we present a reinforcement learning framework that leverages an implementation of the group LASSO regularization to synthesize policies that employ low-dimensional and task-centric memory representations. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach with simulated examples including navigation in discrete and continuous spaces as well as vision-based indoor navigation set in a photo-realistic simulator. The results on these examples indicate that our method is capable of finding policies that rely only on low-dimensional memory representations, improving generalization, and actively reducing memory requirements.