Gaussian Episodic Memory for Long-Term Spatiotemporal Reasoning

Overview & Synopsis

Real-world environments undergo continual semi-static changes, requiring a memory representation that captures both the spatial and temporal evolution of a scene. Existing spatio-temporal memories for robots typically rely either on structured representations, which are limited to the entities and attributes captured during construction, or on image-based memories, which are constrained to previously observed viewpoints. We introduce GEMS, a framework that combines a persistent spatio-temporal 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) map with an agentic reasoning pipeline. The 3DGS map is reconstructed once and subsequently updated only in regions where the scene changes, storing only these modifications while preserving visual detail across time. The agentic pipeline leverages this map to render novel views on demand, iteratively accumulating evidence to answer spatio-temporal questions and ground objects from natural-language queries. To advance future research, we introduce GEMS-Bench, a spatiotemporal question-answering benchmark focused on semi-static environments. It comprises 3 real-world and 12 synthetic environments, spanning 473 question-answer pairs. We evaluate GEMS on novel-view synthesis quality across scene updates, 3D object grounding, spatiotemporal question answering, and storage efficiency. GEMS outperforms recent baselines in 3D object grounding and spatiotemporal question answering, while achieving rendering quality on par with dedicated scene-update methods. Code and data: https://abwerby.github.io/GEMS/