GEM-Occ: From Visual Geometry Evidence to Embodied Semantic Occupancy Memory
Authors: Hu Zhu, Bohan Li, Xianda Guo, Hongsi Liu, Baorui Peng, Mingqi Yuan, Xin Jin, Wenjun Zeng, +1 more
Organizations: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University · Eastern Institute of Technology · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Wuhan University · Georgia Institute of Technology · The University of Hong Kong
Semantic occupancy provides a structured spatial memory for embodied indoor agents by jointly representing occupied regions, observed free space, unknown areas, and object semantics. However, existing indoor occupancy benchmarks and methods mainly focus on single-view prediction or room-level online perception, leaving long-horizon semantic mapping across connected indoor spaces underexplored. We introduce HIOcc, a hierarchical indoor occupancy benchmark that unifies ScanNet, ScanNet++, and Matterport3D under a common sparse semantic occupancy format while preserving their native observation geometries, including perspective RGB-D frames and pano-centric observation groups. HIOcc supports three complementary evaluation regimes: local semantic occupancy prediction, room-level online occupancy mapping, and building-level mapping across connected panoramic environments. We further propose GEM-Occ, a Gaussian Evidence Memory framework for semantic occupancy mapping. Rather than using pointmaps as persistent map states, GEM-Occ treats local visual geometry predictions as transient evidence, converts them into semantic Gaussian occupancy evidence and free-space ray evidence, and fuses them into a persistent hierarchical memory through visibility- and uncertainty-aware causal updates. The memory is organized into local caches, room-level submaps, and a building-level graph, and can be queried at any time through Gaussian-to-occupancy splatting. Experiments on HIOcc show that GEM-Occ improves local occupancy prediction, online map stability, free-space reasoning, revisit consistency, and building-level scalability over prior indoor occupancy and Gaussian-based mapping baselines.
Accurate 3D scene understanding is fundamental to embodied intelligence and autonomous driving, where 3D occupancy provides a unified representation of objects, structures, and free space. However, recovering such a complete volumetric representation from visual observations remains challenging, particularly in occluded and unobserved regions. Visual geometry priors offer strong and generalizable geometric cues for addressing this challenge, but their outputs are inherently surface-centric, whereas occupancy prediction requires reasoning about volumetric interiors and free space. To bridge this gap, we introduce GPOcc, which transforms visual geometry priors into occupancy-aware sparse Gaussian representations for efficient and expressive volumetric scene modeling. Building on GPOcc, GPOcc++ models multi-view observations and temporal sequences within a unified framework, allowing spatial and temporal evidence to be handled through the same representation. We further extend GPOcc++ from indoor scenes to outdoor occupancy prediction. Extensive experiments on both indoor and outdoor benchmarks demonstrate consistently strong performance across both multi-view and temporal settings, together with favorable efficiency and generalization. Code will be released at https://github.com/JuIvyy/GPOcc.
Existing learning-based occupancy prediction methods rely on large-scale 3D annotations and generalize poorly across environments. We present FreeOcc, a training-free framework for open-vocabulary occupancy prediction from monocular or RGB-D sequences. Unlike prior approaches that require voxel-level supervision and ground-truth camera poses, FreeOcc operates without 3D annotations, pose ground truth, or any learning stage. FreeOcc incrementally builds a globally consistent occupancy map via a four-layer pipeline: a SLAM backbone estimates poses and sparse geometry; a geometrically consistent Gaussian update constructs dense 3D Gaussian maps; open-vocabulary semantics from off-the-shelf vision-language models are associated with Gaussian primitives; and a probabilistic Gaussian-to-occupancy projection produces dense voxel occupancy. Despite being entirely training-free and pose-agnostic, FreeOcc achieves over 2× improvements in IoU and mIoU on EmbodiedOcc-ScanNet compared to prior self-supervised methods. We further introduce ReplicaOcc, a benchmark for indoor open-vocabulary occupancy prediction, and show that FreeOcc transfers zero-shot to novel environments, substantially outperforming both supervised and self-supervised baselines. Project page: https://the-masses.github.io/freeocc-web/.
Crucial for autonomous exploration, online 3D occupancy prediction and mapping incrementally constructs dense spatial representations on the fly. However, recent Gaussian-centric methods struggle with structural boundary fidelity and rely heavily on predefined scene-size priors, fundamentally limiting their operational efficiency. In this work, we present VEOcc, a voxel-centric framework formulated as a recursive perception-and-assimilation paradigm. By eliminating the need for initial scale estimation, VEOcc enables highly streamlined, open-ended map expansion. Furthermore, to robustly aggregate noisy temporal observations within the discrete voxel space, we propose a Spatio-Temporal-Aware Online Update Strategy. It integrates Cross-Temporal Logit Aggregation (TLA) for temporal consistency, Reliability-Aware Confidence Modulation (RCM) for spatial uncertainty calibration, and Confidence-Driven Incremental State Update (CSU) for robust global state assimilation. % Extensive experiments on Occ-ScanNet and EmbodiedOcc-ScanNet demonstrate that VEOcc establishes new state-of-the-art performance in both local and embodied settings, providing an accurate and efficient solution for real-world exploration. Extensive experiments on Occ-ScanNet and EmbodiedOcc-ScanNet demonstrate that VEOcc establishes new state-of-the-art performance in both local and embodied settings. Notably, zero-shot evaluations on self-collected video sequences further confirm its robust out-of-distribution generalization capability in completely unseen real-world environments. Ultimately, our framework provides an accurate and highly efficient solution for autonomous exploration. Code and supplementary visualizations are available on our project page: https://wryzju.github.io/VEOcc/.