SARAM: Sparse Adapter Allocation with Reuse and Merging for Lifelong Robot Learning

Lifelong robot learning requires acquiring new tasks sequentially without forgetting earlier ones. With large pre-trained vision-language-action (VLA) backbones, adapter-based methods effectively mitigate this challenge. However, their task-specific adapters and selection modules accumulate with the task stream, creating a scalability challenge in on-disk storage and deployment cost under fixed onboard resource budgets. We propose SARAM, a lifelong learning framework that limits storage growth while keeping GPU memory and per-step inference cost independent of the task stream length. For each new task, SARAM reuses frozen adapters from previous tasks and introduces new adapters only at sparsely selected layers, with a duplication penalty encouraging them to capture information not already represented by the adapter library. At deployment, a compact signature derived from backbone activation statistics identifies the task once per episode, and the corresponding task update is merged into the backbone, leaving only the backbone in the control loop. Across four LIBERO suites, SARAM matches or exceeds adapter-based baselines while adding up to 4.5x less on-disk state per task. GPU memory usage and control frequency remain comparable to those of the backbone as the task stream grows. Experiments on a real UR5 arm with a different backbone further demonstrate retention throughout a sequential task stream.