LongSpace: Exploring Long-Horizon Spatial Memory from Perception to Recall in Video

Shiqiang Lang, Jing Liu, Haoyang He, Peiwen Sun, Yuanteng Chen, Tao Liu, Lan Yang, Longteng Guo, Honggang Zhang


Abstract
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced image and video understanding and can increasingly handle longer visual inputs. Long-horizon tasks such as autonomous driving and robotic navigation require more than recognizing the current view, as models must remember and retrieve previously observed spatial layouts, routes, viewpoint changes, and object states. To evaluate this capability, we introduce LongSpace-Bench, a room-tour video benchmark for long-horizon spatial memory, covering scene perception, spatial relations, and spatial memory. In this work, we further propose LongSpace, a memory framework for long-video spatial reasoning. LongSpace models long videos as sequential chunks, incorporates 3D structural cues into early decoder layers, and constructs layer-aware memory for question-guided retrieval. Experiments on multiple spatial reasoning benchmarks show that LongSpace improves long-video spatial understanding, further demonstrating explicit spatial memory as a key capability for long-horizon video MLLMs.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.227
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5239–5256
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.227/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shiqiang Lang, Jing Liu, Haoyang He, Peiwen Sun, Yuanteng Chen, Tao Liu, Lan Yang, Longteng Guo, and Honggang Zhang. 2026. LongSpace: Exploring Long-Horizon Spatial Memory from Perception to Recall in Video. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 5239–5256, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LongSpace: Exploring Long-Horizon Spatial Memory from Perception to Recall in Video (Lang et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.227.pdf