Tiny Recursive Policy: Recursive Latent Refinement for Visuomotor Control

Overview & Synopsis

Behaviour cloning has become a powerful approach for robotic manipulation, but many modern policies reconstruct their internal representation from a fixed observation window at each prediction and do not maintain persistent latent context throughout execution. We introduce Tiny Recursive Policy (TRP), a parameter-efficient behaviour-cloning policy that combines persistent temporal state with recursive latent refinement. At each control step, TRP repeatedly updates high- and low-level latent states using a shared computation module before decoding an action sequence, and propagates the resulting state to subsequent predictions. We evaluate TRP across LIBERO-100, MetaWorld ML45, and the LIBERO-Mem benchmarks. TRP performs competitively across multi-task and few-shot settings and shows substantial gains on long-horizon and context-dependent tasks, while using significantly fewer parameters than large generative baselines. Execution-time perturbations show that reliance on the persistent carry increases with temporal-context demand, while training with carry perturbations substantially improves robustness to both carry and visual corruptions. Ablations reveal a strong interaction between persistent state and recursive refinement: the benefit of carry depends strongly on the amount of within-step computation, and the resulting performance cannot be explained by parameter count alone.