HearthNet: Edge Multi-Agent Orchestration for Smart Homes

Smart homes and smart devices are becoming more prevalent across millions of homes around the world. With the rise of AI, the smart home industry is quickly increasing its integration to manage common smart home tasks. However, existing work in large language models (LLMs) as agents within smart homes have shown minimal resilience due to limited environment scenarios or poor performance in complex tasks. We explore several strategies for LLMs as agents within the popular open-source software (OSS) smart home automation framework HomeAssistant to increase overall smart home resilience. Our approach combines traditional supervised learning techniques and optimized prompting as the core learning process. We use a diverse set of LLMs covering different levels of reasoning and costs in our optimization pipeline and evaluate their performance on a subset of the hardest tasks in a smart home benchmark. We include ReAct and Reflexion agentic paradigms and reveal how both provide marginal return on investment compared to fine-tuned LLMs for multi-device control within HomeAssistant but show promise in resilience tasks such as failure response.

The smart home is a key domain within the Society 5.0 vision for a human-centered society. Smart home technologies rapidly evolve, and research should diversify while remaining aligned with Society 5.0 objectives. Democratizing smart home research would engage a broader community of innovators beyond traditional limited experts. This shift necessitates inclusive simulation frameworks that support research across diverse fields in industry and academia. However, existing smart home simulators require significant technical expertise, offer limited adaptability, and lack automated evolution, thereby failing to meet the holistic needs of Society 5.0. These constraints impede researchers from efficiently conducting simulations and experiments for security, energy, health, climate, and socio-economic research. To address these challenges, this paper presents the Society 5.0-driven Smart Home Environment Simulator Agent (S5-HES Agent), an agentic simulation framework that transforms traditional smart home simulation through autonomous AI orchestration. The framework coordinates specialized agents through interchangeable large language models (LLMs), enabling natural-language-driven end-to-end smart home simulation configuration without programming expertise. A retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline with semantic, keyword, and hybrid search retrieves smart home knowledge. Comprehensive evaluation on S5-HES Agent demonstrates that the RAG pipeline achieves near-optimal retrieval fidelity, simulated device behaviour and threat scenarios align with real-world IoT datasets, and simulation engine scales predictably across home configurations, establishing a stable foundation for Society 5.0 smart home research. Source code is available under the MIT License at https://github.com/AsiriweLab/S5-HES-Agent.

Large language model agents are moving beyond text-only interaction toward physical-world control, with smart homes as a representative domain. Real domestic interaction requires understanding ambiguous intents, operating in dynamic environments, and performing multi-turn reasoning. However, existing methods struggle to generate high-quality training data for smart home agents. We propose HomeFlow, a verifiable data flywheel for this domain. HomeFlow uses HomeEnv as a unified simulation environment and HomeMaker to procedurally generate diverse home settings. Subsequently, Blueprint compiles open-ended user intents into executable state-based success conditions, while MCTS-Flow synthesizes diverse, verifiable multi-turn trajectories through environment-guided tree search. We then optimize the agents via supervised fine-tuning and step-wise RLVE, which facilitates iterative improvement through authentic physical feedback. We further construct SmartHome-Bench to evaluate the agent across various smart home tasks. On this benchmark, HomeFlow-RL-4B and HomeFlow-RL-8B achieve task success rates of 84.60% and 87.03%. It is worth noting that HomeFlow-RL-8B even surpasses the leading GPT-5.5 by 1.23 percentage points.