CondenseVLA: Learnable History Condensation for Efficient Multi-Frame VLA

Feiyang Hong, Yujie Wei, Bo Zhao, Xiu Su, Hongxun Yao +1

Robot manipulation often depends on short-term cues - such as brief contacts, temporary occlusions, and intermediate object states - that are ambiguous in a single frame and can only be resolved by integrating observations over time. However, injecting historical information solely by enlarging the history window is computationally costly and frequently yields limited gains due to substantial redundancy and task-agnostic, inflexible sampling of observations. We propose CondenseVLA, a multi-frame VLA policy with a learnable decoder-side history condensation module for using short-term visual context in action decoding. Given a sequence of cached per-frame features from the VLM backbone, CondenseVLA distills observation history into a fixed set of slot tokens using learnable queries and multi-head cross-attention. Simple auxiliary regularization penalizes overlap among slot attention maps and decorrelates slot embeddings, encouraging complementary attention and reducing slot redundancy. Across the evaluated tasks, CondenseVLA improves Simpler-WidowX success from 58.7% to 69.8% (+11.1 percentage points), achieves 97.2% on LIBERO, and reaches 52.8% on real-world tasks. It achieves…