Memory lets an embodied agent reuse past experience, yet retaining useful information does not ensure that the agent can apply it when conditions change. We present MemTransfer, a benchmark comparing six memory representations, a working-memory baseline and five representations of past experience, under a shared frozen vision-language-model policy. It comprises 100 navigation cases across ten task types in a simulated warehouse, with expert demonstrations supplying the history. Three comparisons vary the starting pose, route availability, and amount and task relevance of history. With one demonstration per task, Full-context and Episodic memory reach 95.3% and 100.0% success at the original demonstration start, but lose 48-49 percentage points at a new test start. Summary changes little between these two test starts, yet with four demonstrations per task it retains a smaller fraction of its unchanged-route success after blocking (39.3%) than Working memory (44.8%) or the two trajectory memories (56-58%). At the new test start, increasing from one to four relevant demonstrations raises Episodic success by 14.3 percentage points, while the other evaluated representations gain no more than 1.3 percentage points. Replacing half of the relevant histories with other-task experience lowers success for both trajectory memories. These results show that robustness to one kind of mismatch does not imply robustness to another, motivating evaluation of both stored information and its use at decision time.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1 : Three questions about reusing past experience. Left: a new starting pose (RQ1), a blocked route (RQ2), and multiple histories including experience from other tasks (RQ3). Right: a shared policy and working-memory window, with five representations of past experience.
Fig. 2 : Overview. (A) The shared VLM policy receives the task, observation, pose, action feedback, recent interactions and historical memory. (B) Warehouse layout, start poses, target instances and route obstructions. (C) Demonstration starting poses and the six memory representations, with examples of their contents and input sizes. Section III-B defines the comparisons used for each RQ.
Type
Task and route
Task requirement
Basic search
1
Single object search, O→A
Reach one instance of A
2
Category object search, O→C
Reach one item in C
Multi-object search
3
Exhaustive single object search, O→A1→⋯→Ak
Visit every instance of A
4
Exhaustive category search, O→C1→⋯→Cm
Visit every item in C
TABLE I : Navigation tasks used in the three RQs.
Representation
Memory organization
Construction
Decision-time access
Working memory
Ordered recent interactions
Keep the last h steps
Entire recent window
Full-context
Chronological actions and keyframes
Retain actions; select keyframes
All retained actions and keyframes
Summary
Object locations, landmarks and routes
Sequential summarization
Entire summary document
Semantic
Generalized spatial and navigation knowledge
Extract, consolidate and refine knowledge from demonstrations
Entire knowledge document
Hybrid
Summary and Semantic documents
Concatenate the two documents
Both documents
Episodic
Frames linked to expert continuations
Encode frames; retain trajectories
View-matched local continuation
TABLE II : Construction and use of the six memory representations. Each historical representation supplements the working-memory window used by the baseline.
Test start
Original
New
New
New
Route condition
Unchanged
Unchanged
Unchanged
Blocked
Demonstrations per task
1
1
4
4
Representation
Img
Mtok
SR ↑
SPL ↑
SR ↑
SPL ↑
SR ↑
SPL ↑
SR ↑
SPL ↑
Working memory
7
34
15.2±3.0
0.023
22.3±2.9
0.051
22.3±2.9
0.051
10.0±2.6
0.025
Full-context
47
96 / 138
95.3±0.6
0.792
46.7±2.5
0.157
48.0±2.6
0.167
28.0±3.5
0.067
Summary
7
163 / 588
43.0±2.7
0.136
44.3±3.8
0.149
44.0±2.6
0.173
17.3±3.1
0.042
TABLE III : Memory performance across the three RQs.
Test: original start; memory: one demonstration per task
Representation
Original start
Opposite heading
Nearby start
Distant start
Full-context
95.3±0.6
83.0±3.0
77.7±3.1
33.7±4.7
0.792
0.487
0.487
0.076
Episodic
100.0±0.0
96.3±3.1
90.0±1.7
43.0±2.6
0.849
0.701
0.605
0.117
Summary
43.0±2.7
51.7±5.1
46.7±1.5
45.7±4.5
TABLE IV : RQ1: Changing starting pose.
Representation
Δ
reten.
Follow [%]
Recovery [%]
Working memory
0
0.45
64.7±3.1
11.8±4.8
Full-context
−7.7
0.58
71.0±1.0
30.5±2.9
Summary
−14.3
0.39
80.3±0.6
15.3±3.8
Semantic
−0.3
0.25
59.0±2.0
6.3±2.7
Hybrid
—
—
—
—
Episodic
−16.7
0.56
63.3±2.1
29.6±4.7
TABLE V : RQ2: Responses to a blocked route.
Fig. 3 : RQ3: Success under mixed histories. New start, unchanged route, and four demonstrations per task; mixed conditions replace two with other-task histories (Sec. III-B ). Mean SR ± std over three 100-case runs.
Representation
Basic
Multi-object
Loop
T9
Working memory
53 / 30
22 / 9
10 / 1
0 / 0
Full-context
85 / 72
60 / 28
18 / 7
17 / 3
Summary
72 / 35
55 / 25
19 / 1
20 / 0
Semantic
38 / 10
18 / 4
8 / 1
0 / 3
Episodic
93 / 67
78 / 45
22 / 11
93 / 23
TABLE VI : Task completion across navigation requirements.
Long-horizon embodied interaction requires agents to retain and continually update information about the environment as they observe, act, and encounter change. Yet current agents struggle to maintain such memory reliably. Our analysis traces this limitation to four key deficiencies: weak fine-grained visual memory, unreliable dynamic world-state tracking, failing to record world state revealed by interaction outcomes, and limited generalization from prior experience. However, existing benchmarks do not directly assess these memory capabilities during long-horizon embodied interaction. To address this gap, we introduce EmbodiedMemory-Bench (EMem-Bench), comprising 2,554 interactive episodes across four task families. EMem-Bench requires agents to build and update memory from interaction history, then use it to complete a later task by acting in the environment. We further present Embodied-Memorizer (EMem), an external memory system that organizes embodied experience into spatial, event, and scene memories. We also train EMem-8B, an 8B policy that manages and uses these memories. We evaluate a diverse range of open-source and proprietary MLLMs and representative multimodal memory systems. Results show that current models remain weak and uneven across the four challenges. Under matched backbones, EMem achieves the best overall performance among the evaluated memory systems and improves both open-source and proprietary models, while EMem-8B further improves over its backbone. Project page: https://zju-omniai.github.io/EmbodiedMemoryBench/
Lizhou Liang, Xinyu Zhong, Miao Pan +7
Zhejiang University · Central South University · Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Memory allows large language model (LLM) agents to use past experience, often stored as textual records, when responding to requests. For embodied agents that control robots, visual and spatial observations introduce a broader choice of memory modalities, affecting both the information available for subsequent tasks and the model inference costs of constructing and using memory. We introduce MeMoREval, a benchmark for studying this problem through a controlled experience-request protocol. Agents first experience a sequence of events without knowing the subsequent tasks, and subsequently they use memory to respond to information and action requests without receiving new observations. The benchmark comprises 53 tasks across four simulated indoor environments and measures task success alongside the inference costs of memory construction and use. Our reference evaluations reveal that storing frames outperforms storing generated descriptions at lower write-time inference cost for the primary model, while storing frames with scene graphs achieves the highest aggregate task success for every tested model. Extensions to accumulated experience, selective frame retention, and visual input to memory writers demonstrate how the benchmark accommodates further memory-design investigations. Two physical-robot demonstrations establish the feasibility of applying its protocol beyond simulation.
Junxiang Wang, Yuchen Liu, Yi Wu +6
Dexmate · Carnegie Mellon University · Purdue University
Experience reuse can reduce repeated exploration in embodied agents, but a trajectory that succeeded previously may be unsuitable for the current execution context. Existing memory systems pri marily optimize construction and retrieval; semantic relevance and historical success therefore remain insufficient when retrieved ex perience contains incompatible actions or an inappropriate level of structure. We introduce Memory Adaptation for Task-Conditioned Execution (MATE), a deterministic post-retrieval procedure that converts trajectories into execution-oriented memory. MATE re moves obsolete control context, extracts condition-action-effect transitions, applies verified action normalization, selects a task dependent representation, and serializes the result under a fixed budget without additional LLM inference. On 134 ALFWorld tasks, MATE achieves task success rates of 81.3% and 93.3% with Qwen2.5-14B and 72B while using approximately one-tenth of the tokens required by raw trajectories. Controlled comparisons show that verified action normalization is the principal mechanism by which MATE restores the utility of retrieved experience, support ing memory adaptation as a distinct stage between retrieval and embodied execution.
Quanquan Li, Hongbo Zhang, Yihe Chi +5
East China Normal University, Shanghai, China · Peking University, Beijing, China · University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China