PanOVOcc: Panoramic Embodied Open-Vocabulary Occupancy Mapping with Long-term Spatial Voxel Memory

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 $2\times$ 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/.

Embodied agents exploring indoor environments require reliable semantic occupancy memory that persists across observations and revisits. Building such memory is challenging because each observation provides incomplete and uncertain geometric and semantic evidence. We introduce GEM-Occ, a Gaussian Evidence Memory framework that consolidates evidence accumulated over time into persistent semantic occupancy memory. Local predictions are converted into occupied semantic Gaussians and free-space ray evidence. Confidence- and visibility-aware causal updates integrate supporting observations, suppress occupancy contradicted by observed free space, and preserve previously observed structures through occlusion. A hierarchical memory organization supports continued mapping and efficient queries across connected indoor spaces. To evaluate this capability, we introduce HIOcc, a unified benchmark for embodied semantic occupancy memory. HIOcc establishes a shared semantic label space and evaluation framework spanning local prediction, room-level online mapping, and building-level mapping, while accommodating perspective and panoramic observations. Experiments on HIOcc demonstrate that GEM-Occ outperforms existing methods, enabling accurate semantic occupancy prediction and consistent online mapping across spatial scales with efficient memory usage and fast occupancy queries.

Open-vocabulary 3D occupancy is vital for embodied agents, which need to understand complex indoor environments where semantic categories are abundant and evolve beyond fixed taxonomies. While recent work has explored open-vocabulary occupancy in outdoor driving scenarios, such methods transfer poorly indoors, where geometry is denser, layouts are more intricate, and semantics are far more fine-grained. To address these challenges, we adopt a geometry-only supervision paradigm that uses only binary occupancy labels (occupied vs free). Our framework builds upon 3D Language-Embedded Gaussians, which serve as a unified intermediate representation coupling fine-grained 3D geometry with a language-aligned semantic embedding. On the geometry side, we find that existing Gaussian-to-Occupancy operators fail to converge under such weak supervision, and we introduce an opacity-aware, Poisson-based approach that stabilizes volumetric aggregation. On the semantic side, direct alignment between rendered features and open-vocabulary segmentation features suffers from feature mixing; we therefore propose a Progressive Temperature Decay schedule that gradually sharpens opacities during splatting, strengthening Gaussian-language alignment. On Occ-ScanNet, our framework achieves 59.50 IoU and 21.05 mIoU in the open-vocabulary setting, surpassing all existing occupancy methods in IoU and outperforming prior open-vocabulary approaches by a large margin in mIoU. Code will be released at https://github.com/JuIvyy/LegoOcc.