Chameleon: Control-Indexed Prospective Memory for Visuomotor Manipulation

Abstract

Robots often observe information that determines a future action long before that action is executed. In a shell game, for example, a robot first sees which cup hides the ball, watches the cups move, and only later needs to choose the correct cup. The final observation alone is not enough for a decision: the correct action depends on an earlier event. We refer to this temporal gap as observation-action delay. It makes memory a policy-facing problem: a policy must keep similar histories distinct, retrieve the past event relevant to the current decision, and convert that recall into an action-ready state. We call these requirements separability, addressability, and prospectiveness. We introduce Chameleon, a ~60M visuomotor policy for control-indexed prospective memory. Chameleon writes embodied event memory, preserves separable histories, retrieves control-relevant traces, and trains the resulting working state to be prospective. We also introduce Camo-Dataset, a real-robot benchmark that isolates observation-action delay by making the decision scene visually ambiguous, so the correct action must be inferred from earlier observations. Chameleon improves decision/end-to-end success on Camo-Dataset from 22.5%/21.3% to 80.8%/71.3%. On public long-horizon memory benchmarks, it achieves 87.1% +/- 0.8% on LIBERO-10, 97.3% +/- 4.5% on MemoryBench, and 75.1% +/- 1.4% on MIKASA-Robo, setting the state of the art for same-size models and exceeding multiple larger VLA baselines under the reported protocols. Probes and ablations show that Chameleon learns separable, addressable, and prospective memory, and that these properties drive its performance gains.