mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

RoboHarness: A Memory-Augmented Policy Harness for Vision-Language-Action Model Robustness via In-Context Adaptation

arXiv 2603.24060 ↗First posted 25 Mar 2026cs.ROcited by 3

On the map: Vision-language-action models → Reinforcement learning and post-training

Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the promise of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models as generalist robotic controllers, their robustness against perceptual noise and environmental variations in out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks remains fundamentally limited by the absence of long-term memory, causal failure attribution, and dynamic intervention capability. To address this, we propose RoboHarness, a memory-augmented policy harness that upgrades frozen VLA policies for robust in-context adaptation without parameter fine-tuning. Specifically, RoboHarness operates through an online pipeline of contrastive Dual-Memory Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), an attribution-driven vision-language orchestrator implemented with a multimodal large language model, and extensible Model Context Protocol (MCP) interventions, while an offline Memory Consolidation module continuously distills the execution traces into reliable priors. Experimental evaluations across three backbone models (π0, π0.5, and SmolVLA) on LIBERO-PRO and our proposed LIBERO-RoboHarness benchmarks demonstrate that RoboHarness achieves an average absolute success rate gain of 56.6%. This includes a significant absolute improvement of 89.1% in long-horizon task chaining. The project page and source code are available at https://github.com/LZY-1021/RoboHarness.

Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Reinforcement learning and post-training, one of 13 directions in Vision-language-action models. Builds on 25 of its 26 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2026.

Builds on

25 of 26 references.

References · 25

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
  2. 2023Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Trainingcited by 3,109
  3. 2023RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Controlcited by 3,080
  4. 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,887
  5. 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,407
  6. 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,761
  7. 2023LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learningcited by 1,410
  8. 2022Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Controlcited by 1,210
  9. 2025SAM 3: Segment Anything with Conceptscited by 906
  10. 2018MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modellingcited by 766
  11. 2023VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Modelscited by 750
  12. 2025SmolVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Affordable and Efficient Roboticscited by 530
13 more
  1. 2022LM-Nav: Robotic Navigation with Large Pre-Trained Models of Language, Vision, and Actioncited by 439
  2. 2025X-VLA: Soft-Prompted Transformer as Scalable Cross-Embodiment Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 303
  3. 2025LIBERO-Plus: In-depth Robustness Analysis of Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 303
  4. 2024ToolSandbox: A Stateful, Conversational, Interactive Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Tool Use Capabilitiescited by 295
  5. 2025Model Context Protocol (MCP): Landscape, Security Threats, and Future Research Directionscited by 265
  6. 2025LIBERO-PRO: Towards Robust and Fair Evaluation of Vision-Language-Action Models Beyond Memorizationcited by 179
  7. 2024MOKA: Open-World Robotic Manipulation through Mark-Based Visual Promptingcited by 129
  8. 2025Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotics: A Review Towards Real-World Applicationscited by 84
  9. 2025Large VLM-based Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Surveycited by 69
  10. 2025MemER: Scaling Up Memory for Robot Control via Experience Retrievalcited by 67
  11. 2020Human Instruction-Following with Deep Reinforcement Learning via Transfer-Learning from Textcited by 59
  12. 2025From Seeing to Doing: Bridging Reasoning and Decision for Robotic Manipulationcited by 35
  13. 2025RICL: Adding In-Context Adaptability to Pre-Trained Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 22

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026CoRE-VLA: Towards Scalable and Robust Vision-Language-Action Modeling via Conditional Routing of Experts
  2. 2026StateMem: Single-State Residual Memory with Adaptive Inference for Vision-Language-Action Policies
  3. 2026ROAD-VLA: Robust Online Adaptation via Self-Distillation for Vision-Language-Action Models
  4. 2026AR-VLA: True Autoregressive Action Expert for Vision-Language-Action Models
  5. 2026Global Prior Meets Local Consistency: Dual-Memory Augmented Vision-Language-Action Model for Efficient Robotic Manipulation
  6. 2026Retrieve-then-Steer: Online Success Memory for Test-Time Adaptation of Generative VLAs
  7. 2026Reducing Temporal Redundancy for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Inference
  8. 2025RobustVLA: Robustness-Aware Reinforcement Post-Training for Vision-Language-Action Models