Awesome-Memory-for-Robotics

🤖 Memory is a fundamental capability to store, retrieve, and utilize past experiences for improved perception, planning, and decision-making. This mechanism enables robots to learn from experience, adapt to new situations, and operate effectively in complex, dynamic environments.

Here we organized a list of resources on memory for robotics, including papers, code, datasets, and benchmarks.

Scope: Robotics + Memory , not generic LLM memory.

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📋 Table of Contents

• Surveys & Overviews
• Memory Systems & Cognitive Architecture
  • Contextual Memory
  • Episodic Memory
  • Semantic Memory
  • Long-term Memory
• Memory for Manipulation
  • Robotics Foundation Models (RFMs)
  • Mobile Manipulation
  • General Manipulation
• Memory for Navigation
• Memory for Locomotion
• Spatial & Scene Memory
  • 3D Scene Memory
  • Spatial Memory & SLAM
• World Models & Memory
• Lifelong Learning & Continual Learning
  • Experience Replay
  • Skill Transfer & Memory
• Benchmarks & Evaluation
• Datasets
• Contributing

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Taxonomy

Memory in robotics often mixes multiple axes:

• Timescale
  • Contextual memory (within-episode, short-term working memory)
  • Episodic memory (experience replay / trajectories / videos)
  • Semantic memory (facts, object affordances, task graphs)
  • Long-term memory (stable knowledge across tasks)
• Representation
  • key-value / slot memory, RNN / LSTM / Transformer state
  • retrieval over embeddings (RAG / vector DB)
  • 3D maps / NeRF / Gaussian splats / voxel grids
  • symbolic graphs (scene graphs / task graphs)
• Usage
  • policy conditioning (retrieve then act)
  • planning (search over remembered states)
  • perception (temporal integration / object permanence)
  • safety & failure recovery (remember mistakes)

Read more: docs/taxonomy.md

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Surveys & Overviews

There hasn't been a comprehensive survey on memory for robotics, we hope this list can help.

Paper	Venue	Year	Links
MemoryArena: Benchmarking Agent Memory in Interdependent Multi-Session Agentic Tasks	arXiv	2026	[Paper]
World Model for Robot Learning: A Comprehensive Survey	arXiv	2026	[Paper]
From Human Memory to AI Memory: A Survey on Memory Mechanisms in the Era of LLMs	arXiv	2025	[Paper]
Foundation Models in Robotics: Applications, Challenges, and the Future	IJRR	2025	[Paper]
Foundation Model Driven Robotics: A Comprehensive Review	arXiv	2025	[Paper]
Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes in Robotics: A Survey	IEEE T-RO	2022	[Paper]
Skill Transfer Learning for Autonomous Robots and Human-Robot Cooperation: A Survey	RAS	2020	[Paper]

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Memory Systems & Cognitive Architecture

People built memory for robots from our cognitive science. Here are some classical papers:

Paper	Venue	Year	Links
RoboMemory: A Brain-inspired Multi-memory Agentic Framework for Interactive Environmental Learning in Physical Embodied Systems	arXiv	2025	[Paper]
A Memory System of a Robot Cognitive Architecture and its Implementation in ArmarX	RAS	2023	[Paper]
A Memory System for a Conscious Robot	Frontiers	2018	[Paper]
Memory as the Substrate of Cognition: A Developmental Cognitive Robotics Perspective	ResearchGate	2015	[Paper]
Dynamic Learning in Cognitive Robotics through a Procedural Long Term Memory	EAAI	2013	[Paper]
The Development of Embodied Cognition: Six Lessons from Babies	Artificial Life	2005	[Paper]

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Further, I divide memory into four categories: Contextual memory, episodic memory, semantic memory, and long-horizon memory.

Contextual Memory

Working memory maintains task-relevant information during execution. It enables robots to track object states, maintain spatial awareness, and hold intermediate computation results. It is usually implemented by keyframe, history and context-window.

Paper	Venue	Year	Links
MEM: Multi-Scale Embodied Memory for Vision Language Action Models	Physical Intelligence	2026	[Paper] [Project]
ReMem-VLA: Empowering Vision-Language-Action Model with Memory via Dual-Level Recurrent Queries	arXiv	2026	[Paper]
Beyond Short-Horizon: VQ-Memory for Robust Long-Horizon Manipulation in Non-Markovian Simulation Benchmarks	arXiv	2026	[Paper] [Project]
Causal Video Models Are Data-Efficient Robot Policy Learners (DVA)	Rhoda AI	2026	[Project]
DreamZero: World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies	arXiv	2026	[Paper] [Project] [Code]
MemER: Scaling Up Memory for Robot Control via Experience Retrieval	arXiv	2025	[Paper] [Project]
Beyond Sliding Windows: Learning to Manage Memory in Non-Markovian Environments	arXiv	2025	[Paper]
Scaling Short-Term Memory of Visuomotor Policies for Long-Horizon Tasks (PRISM)	Under Review	2025	[Project]
Learning Long-Context Diffusion Policies via Past-Token Prediction	CoRL	2025	[Paper] [Project]
SAM2Act: Integrating Visual Foundation Model with A Memory Architecture for Robotic Manipulation	ICML	2025	[Paper]
A Working Memory Model Improves Cognitive Control in Agents and Robots	COGSYS	2018	[Paper]
Short-term Memory Mechanisms in Neural Network Learning of Robot Navigation Tasks	IEEE	2010	[Paper]

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Episodic Memory

Episodic memory stores specific events and experiences from the robot's past, enabling recall of particular situations, trajectories, and outcomes. It is usually implemented by memory banks, replay buffers, or latent tokens.

Paper	Venue	Year	Links
Chameleon: Episodic Memory for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation	arXiv	2026	[Paper]
HELM: Harness-Enhanced Long-horizon Memory for Vision-Language-Action Manipulation	arXiv	2026	[Paper]
MemoryVLA: Perceptual-Cognitive Memory in Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation	arXiv	2025	[Paper]
Forgetting in Robotic Episodic Long-Term Memory	ECAI	2024	[Paper]
Long Horizon Episodic Decision Making for Cognitively Inspired Robots	COGSYS	2024	[Paper]
Episodic Memory Model for Learning Robotic Manipulation	arXiv	2021	[Paper]
ART Neural Network-based Integration of Episodic Memory and Semantic Memory for Task Planning	AURO	2019	[Paper]
Deep Episodic Memory: Encoding, Recalling, and Predicting Episodic Experiences for Robot Action Execution	IEEE RAL	2018	[Paper]
Storing and Retrieving Perceptual Episodic Memories for Long-term Manipulation Tasks	ICAR	2017	[Paper]
Towards an Episodic Memory for Cognitive Robots	ECAI Workshop	2008	[Paper]

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Semantic Memory

Language provides robots with structured knowledge about concepts, objects, and their relationships. It is usually implemented by Neural Symbolic Model, Chain of Thought Reasoning, or Scene Graphs.

Paper	Venue	Year	Links
EchoVLA: Synergistic Declarative Memory for VLA-Driven Mobile Manipulation	arXiv	2026	[Paper]
GraSP-VLA: Graph-based Symbolic Action Representation for Long-Horizon Planning with VLA Policies	arXiv	2025	[Paper]
Enter the Mind Palace: Reasoning and Planning for Long-term Active Embodied Question Answering	arXiv	2025	[Paper]
Memory-Centric Embodied Question Answering	arXiv	2025	[Paper]
CRESTA: A Cognitivist Framework for Semantic-driven Task Awareness	RAS	2025	[Paper]
A Semantic Memory System for Task Planning under Uncertainties	IROS	2010	[Paper]
KnowRob: Knowledge processing for autonomous robots	IROS	2009	[Paper]
Robot Task Planning using Semantic Maps	RAS	2008	[Paper]

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Long-term Memory

Long-term memory enables continuous accumulation of knowledge across tasks and sessions, supporting lifelong learning and adaptation without catastrophic forgetting. It is usually implemented by experience replay, skill transfer, or continual learning.

Paper	Venue	Year	Links
MEM: Multi-Scale Embodied Memory for Vision Language Action Models	Physical Intelligence	2026	[Paper] [Project]
ReMem-VLA: Empowering Vision-Language-Action Model with Memory via Dual-Level Recurrent Queries	arXiv	2026	[Paper]
Chameleon: Episodic Memory for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation	arXiv	2026	[Paper]
HELM: Harness-Enhanced Long-horizon Memory for Vision-Language-Action Manipulation	arXiv	2026	[Paper]
EchoVLA: Synergistic Declarative Memory for VLA-Driven Mobile Manipulation	arXiv	2026	[Paper]
RoboMemory: A Brain-inspired Multi-memory Agentic Framework for Interactive Environmental Learning in Physical Embodied Systems	arXiv	2025	[Paper]
Preserving and Combining Knowledge in Robotic Lifelong Reinforcement Learning	Nature Machine Intelligence	2025	[Paper]
LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learning	NeurIPS	2023	[Paper]
Online Active Continual Learning for Robotic Lifelong Object Recognition	IEEE T-NNLS	2023	[Paper]
Lifelong Robotic Reinforcement Learning by Retaining Experiences	CoLLAs	2022	[Paper]
A lifelong learning approach to mobile robot navigation	ICRA	2021	[Paper]
Learning an Embedding Space for Transferable Robot Skills	ICLR	2018	[Paper]
RoboEarth: A World Wide Web for Robots	IEEE RA Mag	2011	[Paper]
RatSLAM: A hippocampal model for simultaneous localization and mapping	ICRA	2004	[Paper]
Lifelong robot learning	RAS	1995	[Paper] [Project]

Memory for Manipulation

Robotics Foundation Models (RFMs)

Because non-markovian property makes RFMs like VLAs prone to overfit, it's a huge challenge for RFMs to learn memory. We need to design spatial-temporal memory mechanisms carefully.

Paper	Venue	Year	Links
π0.7: A Steerable Model with Emergent Capabilities	Physical Intelligence	2026	[Paper] [Project]
Causal Video Models Are Data-Efficient Robot Policy Learners (DVA)	Rhoda AI	2026	[Project]
DreamZero: World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies	arXiv	2026	[Paper] [Project] [Code]
MEM: Multi-Scale Embodied Memory for Vision Language Action Models	Physical Intelligence	2026	[Paper] [Project]
ReMem-VLA: Empowering Vision-Language-Action Model with Memory via Dual-Level Recurrent Queries	arXiv	2026	[Paper]
HELM: Harness-Enhanced Long-horizon Memory for Vision-Language-Action Manipulation	arXiv	2026	[Paper]
EchoVLA: Synergistic Declarative Memory for VLA-Driven Mobile Manipulation	arXiv	2026	[Paper]
Beyond Short-Horizon: VQ-Memory for Robust Long-Horizon Manipulation in Non-Markovian Simulation Benchmarks	arXiv	2026	[Paper] [Project]
MemER: Scaling Up Memory for Robot Control via Experience Retrieval	arXiv	2025	[Paper] [Project]
HAMLET: Switch your Vision-Language-Action Model into a History-Aware Policy	arXiv	2025	[Paper] [Project]
HiF-VLA: Hindsight, Insight and Foresight through Motion Representation for Vision-Language-Action Models	arXiv	2025	[Paper]
CronusVLA: Towards Efficient and Robust Manipulation via Multi-Frame Vision-Language-Action Modeling	ArKiv	2025	[Paper] [Project]
GraSP-VLA: Graph-based Symbolic Action Representation for Long-Horizon Planning with VLA Policies	arXiv	2025	[Paper]
MemoryVLA: Perceptual-Cognitive Memory in Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation	arXiv	2025	[Paper]

Mobile Manipulation

Paper	Venue	Year	Links
EchoVLA: Synergistic Declarative Memory for VLA-Driven Mobile Manipulation	arXiv	2026	[Paper]
Searching in Space and Time: Unified Memory-Action Loops for Open-World Object Retrieval	arXiv	2025	[Paper] [Project]
DynaMem: Online Dynamic Spatio-Semantic Memory for Open World Mobile Manipulation	arXiv	2024	[Paper]
CLIP-Fields: Weakly Supervised Semantic Fields for Robotic Memory	RSS	2023	[Paper] [Project]

General Manipulation

Paper	Venue	Year	Links
Chameleon: Episodic Memory for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation	arXiv	2026	[Paper]
HELM: Harness-Enhanced Long-horizon Memory for Vision-Language-Action Manipulation	arXiv	2026	[Paper]
Beyond Short-Horizon: VQ-Memory for Robust Long-Horizon Manipulation in Non-Markovian Simulation Benchmarks	arXiv	2026	[Paper] [Project]
RMBench: Memory-Dependent Robotic Manipulation Benchmark with Insights into Policy Design	arXiv	2026	[Paper] [Project] [Code]
Rethinking Progression of Memory State in Robotic Manipulation: An Object-Centric Perspective	AAAI	2026	[Paper]
Gated Memory Policy	arXiv	2026	[Paper] [Project]
Learning Long-Context Diffusion Policies via Past-Token Prediction	CoRL	2025	[Paper] [Project]
SAM2Act: Integrating Visual Foundation Model with A Memory Architecture for Robotic Manipulation	ICML	2025	[Paper]
Out of Sight, Still in Mind: Reasoning and Planning about Unobserved Objects with Video Tracking Enabled Memory Models	ICRA	2024	[Paper]
RoboEXP: Action-Conditioned Scene Graph via Interactive Exploration for Robotic Manipulation	CoRL	2024	[Paper] [Project]

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Memory for Navigation

Memory is of great importance for navigation, there has been rich research on it.

Paper	Venue	Year	Links
Remember to be Curious: Episodic Context and Persistent Worlds for 3D Exploration	arXiv	2026	[Paper] [Project] [Code]
Spatially-Enhanced Recurrent Memory for Long-Range Mapless Navigation via End-to-End Reinforcement Learning	arXiv	2025	[Paper]
MemoNav: Working Memory Model for Visual Navigation	CVPR	2024	[Paper]
Memory-Maze: Scenario Driven Benchmark and Visual Language Navigation Model for Guiding Blind People	arXiv	2024	[Paper]
Visual Language Maps for Robot Navigation (VLMaps)	ICRA	2023	[Paper] [Project]
Emergence of Maps in the Memories of Blind Navigation Agents	ICLR	2023	[Paper] [Project]
Memory-Augmented Reinforcement Learning for Image-Goal Navigation	IROS	2022	[Paper]
Structured Scene Memory for Vision-Language Navigation	CVPR	2021	[Paper]
Visual Graph Memory with Unsupervised Representation for Visual Navigation	ICCV	2021	[Paper]
Deep Visual Odometry With Adaptive Memory	TPAMI	2020	[Paper]
MultiON: Benchmarking Semantic Map Memory using Multi-Object Navigation	NeurIPS	2020	[Paper]
Scene Memory Transformer for Embodied Agents in Long-Horizon Tasks	CVPR	2019	[Paper]
Visual Memory for Robust Path Following	NeurIPS	2018	[Paper]
Cognitive Memory and Mapping in a Brain-like System for Robotic Navigation	Neural Networks	2017	[Paper]
Learning Indoor Robot Navigation using Visual and Sensorimotor Map	PMC	2013	[Paper]
Image-based Robot Navigation from an Image Memory	RAS	2007	[Paper]
3D Navigation based on a Visual Memory	ICRA	2006	[Paper]

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Memory for Locomotion

Paper	Venue	Year	Links
LocoFormer: Generalist Locomotion via Long-context Adaptation	CoRL	2025	[Paper] [Project]
Sim-to-Real Transfer for Quadrupedal Locomotion via Terrain Transformer (TERT)	RA-L	2023	[Paper]
Learning Vision-Guided Quadrupedal Locomotion End-to-End with Cross-Modal Transformers (LocoTransformer)	ICLR	2022	[Paper] [Project]
RMA: Rapid Motor Adaptation for Legged Robots	RSS	2021	[Paper] [Project]
Rapidly Adaptable Legged Robots via Evolutionary Meta-Learning	IROS	2020	[Paper] [Blog]

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Spatial & Scene Memory

3D Scene Memory

Representing and reasoning about 3D environments.

Paper	Venue	Year	Links
Remember to be Curious: Episodic Context and Persistent Worlds for 3D Exploration	arXiv	2026	[Paper] [Project] [Code]
3D-Mem: 3D Scene Memory for Embodied Exploration and Reasoning	CVPR	2025	[Paper] [Project]
What Is The Best 3D Scene Representation for Robotics?	arXiv	2025	[Paper]
SnapMem: 3D Scene Memory for Embodied Exploration	OpenReview	2024	[Paper]
Embodied-RAG: General Non-parametric Embodied Memory for Retrieval and Generation	arXiv	2024	[Paper]
Searching in Space and Time: Unified Memory-Action Loops for Open-World Object Retrieval	arXiv	2025	[Paper] [Project]
ConceptFusion: Open-set Multimodal 3D Mapping	RSS	2023	[Paper] [Project]
Hierarchical Representations and Explicit Memory: Learning Effective Navigation Policies on 3D Scene Graphs	ICRA	2022	[Paper]

Spatial Memory & SLAM

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping(SLAM) is the most fundamental explicit type of memory.

Paper	Venue	Year	Links
Unsupervised Online Learning for Robotic Interestingness with Visual Memory	IEEE T-RO	2021	[Paper] [Code]
Probabilistic Data Association for Semantic SLAM	ICRA	2017	[Paper]
SLAM-Based Spatial Memory for Behavior-Based Robots	IFAC	2015	[Paper]
RGB-D Mapping: Using Kinect-Style Depth Cameras for Dense 3D Modeling of Indoor Environments	IJRR	2012	[Paper]

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World Models & Memory

World models that incorporate memory for prediction and planning.

Paper	Venue	Year	Links
Causal Video Models Are Data-Efficient Robot Policy Learners (DVA)	Rhoda AI	2026	[Project]
MosaicMem: Persistent Geometry + Dynamic Content for Long-Horizon World Models	arXiv	2026	[Paper] [Project]
World Model for Robot Learning: A Comprehensive Survey	arXiv	2026	[Paper]
DreamZero: World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies	arXiv	2026	[Paper] [Project] [Code]
Mastering Diverse Control Tasks through World Models	Nature	2025	[Paper]
Ctrl-World: A Controllable Generative World Model for Robot Manipulation	arXiv	2025	[Paper]
Genie 3: A New Frontier for World Models	Google DeepMind	2025	[Blog]
ManiGaussian: Dynamic Gaussian Splatting for Multi-task Robotic Manipulation	ECCV	2024	[Paper] [Project]
Mastering Memory Tasks with World Models (R2I)	ICLR	2024	[Paper]

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Lifelong Learning & Continual Learning

Experience Replay

Paper	Venue	Year	Links
Lifelong Robotic Reinforcement Learning by Retaining Experiences	CoLLAs	2022	[Paper]
Selective Experience Replay for Lifelong Learning	AAAI	2018	[Paper]

Lifelong Learning Frameworks

Paper	Venue	Year	Links
Preserving and Combining Knowledge in Robotic Lifelong Learning	Nature MI	2025	[Paper]
Towards General Purpose Robots at Scale: Memory and Lifelong Learning	arXiv	2024	[Paper]
A Lifelong Learning Approach to Mobile Robot Navigation	IEEE RAL	2021	[Paper]

Skill Transfer & Memory

Paper	Venue	Year	Links
Efficient Policy Learning by Extracting Transferable Robot Skills	CoRL	2024	[Paper]
Unsupervised Skill Transfer Learning for Autonomous Robots	RAS	2021	[Paper]
Skill Transfer Learning for Autonomous Robots and Human-Robot Cooperation: A Survey	RAS	2020	[Paper]
Learning an Embedding Space for Transferable Robot Skills	ICLR	2018	[Paper]

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Benchmarks & Evaluation

We treasure these features that actually pose challenges to memory:

• Partial observability: occlusions, hidden states, deferred rewards
• Long-horizon: requires recalling earlier observations/instructions
• Distribution shift: new scenes, objects, layouts
• Recovery: can the robots use memory to diagnose and retry?

Benchmark	Year	Focus	Links
RoboMemArena	2026	26 long-horizon memory tasks with multimodal memory annotations and paired real-world tasks	[Paper] [Project]
MIKASA-Robo-VLA	2026	90 memory tasks across 10 memory types for VLA evaluation on tabletop manipulation	[Paper] [Project] [Code]
RoboMME	2026	16 manipulation tasks for temporal, spatial, object, and procedural memory in robotic generalist policies	[Paper] [Project]
RMBench	2026	9 memory-dependent manipulation tasks over multiple memory-complexity levels	[Paper] [Project] [Code]
LIBERO-Mem	2026	Object-centric non-Markovian manipulation under object-level partial observability	[Paper]
MemMimic	2026	Non-Markovian imitation tasks with in-trial and cross-trial memory regimes	[Paper] [Project]

Read more: docs/evaluation.md

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Datasets

See: docs/datasets.md

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Citation

If you find this repository useful, please consider citing:

@misc{awesome-memory-for-robotics,
  author = {Jie Wang},
  title = {Awesome Memory for Robotics},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/Everloom-129/Awesome-Memory-for-Robotics}}
}

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Contributing

PRs welcome! Please read the contribution guidelines.

To add a new paper or resource:

1. Fork this repository
2. Add your entry in the appropriate section
3. Submit a pull request

Please ensure your PR follows the existing format and includes:

• Paper title
• Venue and year
• Links to paper, code, and project page (if available)

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Related Awesome Lists

• Awesome Memory for Agents — [repo]
• Awesome Multimodal Memory — [repo]
• Awesome LLM Robotics — [repo]

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License

This work is licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal.

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