# Adaptive World Memory 3D Foundation Model for Scalable 3D Mapping, Localization, and Rendering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21502 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21502/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 70 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Spatial and embodied reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/spatial-and-embodied-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 70)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [On the Properties of Neural Machine Translation: Encoder-Decoder Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1259/) (2014)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05797/) (2019)
- [ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual-Inertial and Multi-Map SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11898/) (2020)
- [ORB-SLAM2: an Open-Source SLAM System for Monocular, Stereo and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06475/) (2016)
- [DROID-SLAM: Deep Visual SLAM for Monocular, Stereo, and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10869/) (2021)
- [NICE-SLAM: Neural Implicit Scalable Encoding for SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12130/) (2021)
- [Continuous 3D Perception Model with Persistent State](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12387/) (2025)
- [Linear Transformers Are Secretly Fast Weight Programmers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11174/) (2021)
- [MonST3R: A Simple Approach for Estimating Geometry in the Presence of Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03825/) (2024)
- [VINS-Mono: A Robust and Versatile Monocular Visual-Inertial State Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03852/) (2017)
- [Gaussian Splatting SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06741/) (2023)
- [SplaTAM: Splat, Track & Map 3D Gaussians for Dense RGB-D SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02126/) (2023)
- [Fast3R: Towards 3D Reconstruction of 1000+ Images in One Forward Pass](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13928/) (2025)
- [Learning to (Learn at Test Time): RNNs with Expressive Hidden States](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04620/) (2024)
- [π3: Permutation-Equivariant Visual Geometry Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13347/) (2025)
- [Neural RGB-D Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04532/) (2021)
- [GS-SLAM: Dense Visual SLAM with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11700/) (2023)
- [3D Reconstruction with Spatial Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16061/) (2024)
- [MASt3R-SLAM: Real-Time Dense SLAM with 3D Reconstruction Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12392/) (2024)
- [Deep Patch Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04726/) (2022)
- [Robust Consistent Video Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05901/) (2020)
- [DeepV2D: Video to Depth with Differentiable Structure from Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04605/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent 3D foundation models enable generalizable geometric reasoning from RGB images but remain limited in persistent memory, scalability, and renderable scene modeling. We present a memory-centric 3D foundation model for scalable robotic localization, reconstruction, and Gaussian rendering. Its core is an adaptive world memory mechanism that combines transformer-based gated updates with test-time temporal-spatial regulation. Learned gates control recurrent memory propagation, while temporal state evolution and spatial observation-state consistency regulate token-wise updates and forgetting over long image sequences. To support large-scale mapping, we organize memory into local submaps and integrate progressive mapping and tracking, loop closure, and SL(4)-based global refinement to maintain local accuracy and global consistency. A Gaussian reconstruction head decodes memory-enhanced features into renderable primitives, unifying camera pose estimation, dense point-cloud reconstruction, and photorealistic rendering within a single model. Experiments on public benchmarks and self-collected datasets from diverse robotic platforms demonstrate improved trajectory accuracy, reconstruction completeness, and rendering quality over existing 3D foundation reconstruction and SLAM baselines. These results support adaptive memory as a foundation for persistent robotic world modeling. The dataset and code will be made publicly available at hrefhttps://github.com/dtc111111/AWM-3DFMhttps://github.com/dtc111111/AWM-3DFM.