研究视觉语言模型记忆过时如何导致导航失败,揭示安全风险。
When Memory Lies: An Empirical Study of Spatial Memory Staleness in VLM Agents

- 用动态环境测试记忆是否过时,对比文本与图像输入
- 依赖过时记忆的模型死亡率是无记忆时的两倍以上
- 视觉校验不可靠时,过滤机制效果有限,需更强视觉理解
记忆增强型视觉语言模型代理依赖持久的空间知识,但环境变化会使这些知识悄然过时。我们探究当代理自信的记忆与新观察冲突时会发生什么,以及当前模型能否在错误发生前识别矛盾。在动态FrozenLake测试环境中,对三个闭源模型和三个开源视觉语言模型进行测试,涵盖文本与图像输入(共1800次检测运行,12000次文本导航任务,4个LLM导航器,50个种子规模)。结果发现:第一,文本可解不代表视觉可靠——能从文本中准确标记过时记忆的模型,其视觉F1值从0.887降至0.067,最弱模型仍会基于图像做出流畅且自信的错误决策;第二,未经审计直接使用过时记忆存在安全风险——在主要GPT-4o设置中,信任原始记忆的代理死亡率超过无记忆版本的两倍;第三,审计虽有帮助但无法弥补差距——透明读取过滤器在文本模式下显著降低安全风险,但即使使用理想标签,在当前网格规模下也无法进一步提升性能,且当视觉审计不可靠时,过滤无稳定收益。这些结果将空间记忆过时视为关键安全失效模式,并指出可靠视觉对齐与冲突下的动作选择是当前记忆增强代理的核心挑战。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Memory-augmented VLM agents act on persistent spatial knowledge, yet that knowledge silently goes stale as the environment changes. We ask what happens when an agent must reconcile a confident memory claim with a contradicting observation, and whether current models can catch the conflict before it becomes a safety-relevant mistake. Using a dynamic FrozenLake testbed, we pair a staleness-detection task with a downstream navigation task across three closed-source models and three open-weight VLMs under both text and image inputs (1,800 detection runs, and 12,000 text-mode navigation episodes over four LLM navigators at a shared 50-seed scale). Three findings emerge. First, text solvability does not imply visual grounding: models that flag stale entries reliably from text nonetheless span vision F1 from 0.887 down to 0.067 on the identical grids, and the weakest keeps making fluent, confident decisions that ignore the image. Second, consuming stale memory without an audit is a safety liability: in our primary GPT-4o setting, an agent that trusts raw memory dies more than twice as often as the same agent given no memory at all. Third, auditing helps but does not close the gap: a transparent read-time filter removes much of the safety cost in text mode, yet even oracle stale labels bring no further significant gain on the current grid size, and when visual auditing is unreliable, filtering yields no consistent benefit. Together these results frame spatial-memory staleness as a safety failure mode and isolate reliable visual grounding and action selection under memory--observation conflict as the central open challenges for memory-augmented agents.
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