I’m very excited by this test time training work for robotic learning! It’s an awesome collaboration between @StanfordSVL and @NVIDIARobotics !
@DrJimFan:
We scaled a robot model natively to 8,000 timesteps of context, 5 minutes worth of muscle memory, with constant inference cost. Robot policies used to live their lives a few frames at a time (< 0.1 sec), instantly forgetting what just happened. We pushed to 3 orders of magnitude beyond SOTA.
Introducing RoboTTT. Test-Time Training (“TTT”) carries a tiny model inside the model. Every incoming sensor reading triggers one gradient step on that tiny core, so the history keeps getting compressed into its weights. The hidden state has a fixed size (literally a small neural net), so the robot can “grok” arbitrarily long experience with little overhead. Learning continues indefinitely after deployment.
We can then put an entire video in context as prompt! RoboTTT enables one-shot in-context learning from human video: in circuit board assembly, a human demonstrates a never-seen configuration once, and the robot imitates it faithfully.
Humans drop things all the time, but we pick them up so fast that we don’t even notice. That reflex to fix is half of our physical competence. RoboTTT shows self-improvement on the fly: the robot is skilled at recovering from its own errors mid-episode, and each fix enters its context to inform the next move. The TTT core distills a general-purpose, failure-to-correction mapping from the training data.
One more thing. What excites me the most is a new Context Scaling Curve: from 128 to 8K timesteps, closed-loop performance hill-climbs steadily with no sign of saturation. 8K-context pretraining beats 1K by 62%. What LLM enjoys, robotics should too. Soon, even 1M context is not a fantasy.
Deep dive in thread:
