PersonalHomeBench: Evaluating Agents in Personalized Smart Homes
Authors: Manasa Bharadwaj, Yolanda Liu, InJung Yang, Sungil Kim, Nikhil Verma, KoKeun Kim, Kevin Ferreira, YoungJoon Kim
Abstract
Agentic AI systems are rapidly advancing toward real-world applications, yet their readiness in complex and personalized environments remains insufficiently characterized. To address this gap, we introduce PersonalHomeBench, a benchmark for evaluating foundation models as agentic assistants in personalized smart home environments. The benchmark is constructed through an iterative process that progressively builds rich household states, which are then used to generate personalized, context-dependent tasks. To support realistic agent-environment interaction, we provide PersonalHomeTools, a comprehensive toolbox enabling household information retrieval, appliance control, and situational understanding. PersonalHomeBench evaluates both reactive and proactive agentic abilities under unimodal and multimodal observations. Thorough experimentation reveals a systematic performance reduction as task complexity increases, with pronounced failures in counterfactual reasoning and under partial observability, where effective tool-based information gathering is required. These results position PersonalHomeBench as a rigorous evaluation platform for analyzing the robustness and limitations of personalized agentic reasoning and planning.
Smart homes are evolving toward complex state-dependent living environments, requiring Large Language Models (LLMs) to reason over user intent, preferences, and multi-device interactions. However, existing smart-home benchmarks often focus on static instruction-to-API mapping or limited simulations, failing to evaluate whether LLMs can reason, interact, and act reliably in realistic household scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce SMH-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LLMs in smart-home environments. Built upon HomeEnv, an executable and verifiable smart-home simulator, SMH-Bench contains 1,100 high-quality tasks spanning 7 categories and 22 fine-grained subcategories. It further stratifies tasks across simple, medium and complex homes, ranging from small apartments to dense multi-room environments with 135 devices. Experiments show that although frontier LLMs achieve strong performance on explicit control and query tasks, they still exhibit significant weaknesses in automation task scheduling, ambiguity handling and personalized reasoning, especially as home complexity increases. We hope SMH-Bench will facilitate the development of more reliable, context-aware, and practically deployable smart-home agents.
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.
Personal AI assistants are increasingly deployed as task-oriented, tool-augmented agents that operate within unified service environments to support everyday user activities. In realistic settings, such assistants must reason over persistent user state, respect user-specific configurations and permissions, and sustain long-horizon, constraint-aware interactions across multiple services. Existing benchmarks, however, often fragment service contexts or abstract away user state, limiting their ability to evaluate user-centric personal assistant behavior in realistic service settings. We introduce PAUSE, a user-centric benchmark for evaluating personal AI assistants in stateful, service-integrated environments. PAUSE captures core challenges of real-world assistant deployment by requiring agents to coordinate actions across heterogeneous user-owned resources while maintaining consistency with environment state, authorization constraints over multi-turn interactions. The benchmark incorporates explicit user-agent interaction via realistic user simulation, enabling evaluation beyond static tool execution. To support principled and reproducible evaluation, PAUSE adopts a multi-regime evaluation framework aligned with task characteristics. Open-ended service management tasks are assessed using semantic and trajectory-level behavioral metrics, while constraint-intensive tasks admit deterministic, state-based verification. Benchmark results show that even state-of-the-art proprietary models fail to reach 70% task completion on scenarios requiring stateful reasoning and configuration awareness, revealing consistent and interpretable failure patterns. Finally, we present a user-centric synthesis pipeline that enables scalable generation of coherent service environments, user configurations, and reliably annotated tasks, supporting benchmark extensibility and future research.