MemAct: Streaming Spatial Understanding with Memory and Active Exploration

Yuxi Wei, Wei Huang, Qirui Chen, Lu Hou, Xiaojuan Qi

Spatial understanding is essential for embodied agents navigating and interacting with the physical world. As observations arrive incrementally, agents must reason in a streaming manner. Yet streaming understanding must also be closed-loop: task-relevant evidence may require both recalling past observations and actively acquiring new views. Existing streaming approaches largely emphasize processing incoming observations, leaving task-driven active exploration underexplored. We introduce MemAct, a framework for streaming spatial understanding with memory and action. A shared vision--language model incrementally writes structured historical memory, retrieves records and past frames on demand, and acquires additional evidence through movement and turning. Retrieved evidence and action observations inform subsequent decisions, enabling the agent to continue exploring or answer within a unified reasoning loop. We develop the MemAct suite, a data generation pipeline and collection across real and simulated environments, with approximately 1M training examples for spatial reasoning, memory writing, retrieval, and exploration. Its MemAct-bench comprises 20,000 main QA pairs evaluating…