What Spatial Memory Must Store: Occlusion as the Test for Language-Agent Memory

arXiv:2606.10299v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-agent "memory palace" systems anchor each memory to a world coordinate, on the intuition that geometry adds something text cannot. We make that intuition testable and report three results. First, the memory-palace default of folding spatial proximity into a linear blend beside recency and importance does not help and can hurt: in a pre-registered recall experiment the shipped blend fails its own frozen test (mean Delta-Hit@5 -0.0375, Wilcoxon p=0.306), sitting at a position-blind baseline, while a geometry-led weighting wins decisively (+0.3208, p0.000, pooled exact McNemar p=2.5x10^-29), a run that surfaced and fixed a real relay anchor defect. We concede that occlusion-needs-geometry is near-tautological; the contribution is the measurement and isolation, separating what spatial memory must store from how it is read. These pilots power a frozen confirmatory study (SPMEM-ZERO-REAL-PREREG-v1); the full human-authored multi-world study with blind raters remains future work.

Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-06-10