cs.CLApr 10, 2026

S3Mem: Structured Spatiotemporal Scene-Event Memory for Long-Horizon Interactive Question Answering

Authors: Encheng Su, Jianyu Wu, Jinouwen Zhang, Qiucheng Yu, Chen Tang, Pengze Li, Lintao Wang, Aoran Wang, 

Organizations: University of Science and Technology of China · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Shanghai AI Laboratory · City University of Hong Kong · 

Abstract

Long-horizon memory question answering often requires sparse evidence from heterogeneous histories, including events, object states, visual observations, temporal relations, and causal steps. Existing memory interfaces expand reader context, retrieve semantically related chunks, or expose graph neighborhoods, but they are not explicitly designed to select compact evidence for a fixed reader. We propose Structured Spatiotemporal Scene--Event Memory (S3Mem), a query-time memory interface that writes textual, visual, and agent-use histories into structured scene--event units and routes compact evidence packs to the reader. Its router scores candidate units, query anchors, and anchor--support links, enabling both single-hop selection and short multi-hop evidence chains without reader fine-tuning or test-time training. Across LoCoMo, EMemBench Visual Games, and AMA-Bench, S3Mem provides a strong score--token trade-off, with the clearest gains on localized event, state, temporal, causal, or provenance evidence. On LoCoMo, S3Mem reaches 0.480.48 F1 and 0.400.40 BLEU with (1{,}073) evidence tokens per question, about 15.8×15.8\times fewer than the LoCoMo reference. On EMemBench Visual Games, it obtains the best F1 and second-best accuracy with only 189189tokens.On AMA-Bench, it is not the highest-scoring method, but remains competitive while using the fewest reader-visible evidence tokens.

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