Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wang, Pan, Hu, Yihao, Liu, Xiujin, Yang, Jingchu, Wang, Hang, Wen, Zhihao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17933
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910231740547072
author Wang, Pan
Hu, Yihao
Liu, Xiujin
Yang, Jingchu
Wang, Hang
Wen, Zhihao
author_facet Wang, Pan
Hu, Yihao
Liu, Xiujin
Yang, Jingchu
Wang, Hang
Wen, Zhihao
contents Vision-language model (VLM) agents increasingly rely on memory-augmented reinforcement learning to reuse experience across long-horizon tasks, yet most existing frameworks store memory as text and depend on proprietary teacher models to summarize or refine it. This design is poorly matched to spatial decision making: geometric priors are compressed into lossy language, and sparse interaction is often supervised through delayed textual feedback rather than dense visually grounded signals. We argue that reusable experience for VLM agents should remain visually grounded. Based on this insight, we propose \textbf{AtlasVA}, a teacher-free visual skill memory framework that organizes memory into three complementary layers: spatial heatmaps, visual exemplars, and symbolic text skills. AtlasVA further evolves danger and affinity atlases directly from trajectory statistics and lightweight grid heuristics, and reuses these self-evolving atlases as potential-based shaping rewards for reinforcement learning. This unifies perception, memory, and optimization without external LLM supervision. Experiments on \textsc{Sokoban}, \textsc{FrozenLake}, 3D embodied navigation, and 3D robotic manipulation benchmarks show that AtlasVA consistently outperforms text-centric memory baselines and competitive VLM agents, with especially strong gains on spatially intensive tasks. Homepage: https://wangpan-ustc.github.io/AtlasvaWeb
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_17933
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AtlasVA: Self-Evolving Visual Skill Memory for Teacher-Free VLM Agents
Wang, Pan
Hu, Yihao
Liu, Xiujin
Yang, Jingchu
Wang, Hang
Wen, Zhihao
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Vision-language model (VLM) agents increasingly rely on memory-augmented reinforcement learning to reuse experience across long-horizon tasks, yet most existing frameworks store memory as text and depend on proprietary teacher models to summarize or refine it. This design is poorly matched to spatial decision making: geometric priors are compressed into lossy language, and sparse interaction is often supervised through delayed textual feedback rather than dense visually grounded signals. We argue that reusable experience for VLM agents should remain visually grounded. Based on this insight, we propose \textbf{AtlasVA}, a teacher-free visual skill memory framework that organizes memory into three complementary layers: spatial heatmaps, visual exemplars, and symbolic text skills. AtlasVA further evolves danger and affinity atlases directly from trajectory statistics and lightweight grid heuristics, and reuses these self-evolving atlases as potential-based shaping rewards for reinforcement learning. This unifies perception, memory, and optimization without external LLM supervision. Experiments on \textsc{Sokoban}, \textsc{FrozenLake}, 3D embodied navigation, and 3D robotic manipulation benchmarks show that AtlasVA consistently outperforms text-centric memory baselines and competitive VLM agents, with especially strong gains on spatially intensive tasks. Homepage: https://wangpan-ustc.github.io/AtlasvaWeb
title AtlasVA: Self-Evolving Visual Skill Memory for Teacher-Free VLM Agents
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17933