Learning to Live: A Step Toward Lifelong Embodied Intelligence

Giving embodied agents the freedom to act autonomously, initiate interactions, and understand their surroundings through experience is a step toward bringing them to life in the physical world. Realizing this vision requires action, interaction, and memory to work together, so that each encounter can inform current decisions and contribute experience for future tasks. We present EvoLife, a unified navigation harness that enables a multimodal embodied agent to choose how to move, when to ask, and what experience to carry forward. Its hybrid action space supports waypoint navigation, local discrete adjustments, pixel-based navigation, and object-directed navigation. Active interaction allows the agent to seek clarification or assistance when it encounters ambiguity or difficulty, while persistent spatial memory binds observations and dialogue to places, retaining useful experience to guide subsequent visits. We evaluate eight benchmarks across four task families: vision-language navigation, object navigation, interactive instance navigation, and continuous multi-task navigation. With an average of only 1.87 active interactions per episode, our method achieves a first-visit success rate (SR) of 100% across four 100-episode sets spanning vision-language navigation and object navigation. Complete-sequence SR reaches 98% on 50 LHPR-VLN sequences and 94% on 50 GOAT-Bench sequences. In the R2R revisit setting, success weighted by path length (SPL) increases from 82.23% to 93.31% with retained experience. Multi-day physical navigation further demonstrates exploration, proactive help-seeking, and revisiting remembered places. Together, these results advance the vision of bringing embodied agents to life through autonomous action, proactive interaction, and the accumulation and reuse of experience.

Large language model agents are expected to continuously adapt to new tasks and environments over their lifetime by reusing past experience. However, existing memory-based agents struggle to transfer reusable experience across environments and suffer from catastrophic forgetting as experience accumulated. To address these challenges, we propose LifeMem, a lifelong learning framework that enables agents to transfer knowledge across multiple environments. During learning, LifeMem clusters accumulated interaction trajectories based on underlying workflows to extract reusable skills. When solving a new task at inference time, the agent recalls relevant skills and trajectories to guide actions. To validate our method, we conduct experiments across 10 environments and over 13k tasks with 2k newly annotated interaction trajectories. Results show that LifeMem enables effective experience reuse in lifelong learning, achieving both reduced forgetting on learned tasks and superior cross-task transfer. Further analysis reveals that task streaming impacts learning, while consolidating structurally similar trajectories within memory boosts performance.

Recent advances in generative foundation models have expanded the capabilities of embodied AI, enabling increasingly general navigation, manipulation, and long-horizon task execution. However, effective interaction with dynamic environments requires more than only strong perception and reasoning: agents must act with partial knowledge and retain, retrieve, and update information from past observations, actions, and experiences. This survey examines embodied memory as a mechanism for preserving decision-relevant information beyond the current observation. We organize existing approaches along two complementary dimensions: six fundamental memory requirements, spanning world-state persistence, task progress, belief maintenance, and experiential learning; and eight architectural categories, including recurrent states, fast weights, visual and symbolic representations, spatial memory, and experience-based systems. We analyze their capabilities and limitations, and examine how existing benchmarks evaluate memory-dependent behavior, distinguishing genuine use of historical information from general task performance. Finally, we identify open challenges in selecting relevant experiences, maintaining consistent beliefs in changing environments, and consolidating knowledge across episodes. Our analysis provides a framework for understanding memory as an essential component of reliable, adaptive, and lifelong-horizon embodied intelligence.