Encoding Memory in World Models with Test-Time Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) approaches have demonstrated strong performance across diverse domains in recent years, learning accurate world models from agent trajectories. However, despite this progress, current approaches still struggle to surpass human performance on tasks that require long-term memory and planning. In this work, we address the problem of long-term memory in MBRL by moving beyond the commonly studied paradigm of architecture design. We introduce Test-Time Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (TT-MBRL), using gradient descent at test time to encode the memory of episode observations into world model parameters. This enables the agent to learn a distinct world model for each episode, improving memory capabilities compared to traditional approaches that solely rely on contextual memory. We first establish a proof of concept on a simplified two-dimensional variant of the Memory Maze environment, which we refer to as Memory Maze 2D, showing consistent improvements across different world model architectures. We then demonstrate the effectiveness of TT-MBRL in the 3D domain, achieving new state-of-the-art results on the Memory Maze benchmark. Finally, we show that TT-MBRL maintains strong performance on non-memory benchmarks such as DeepMind Control and Atari 100k. Our code will be made publicly available for full reproducibility.