# Embodied Agents Meet Personalization: Investigating Challenges and Solutions Through the Lens of Memory Utilization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16348 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16348/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agent memory systems, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 39 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Agent memory systems](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agent-memory-systems/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09246/) (2024)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16291/) (2023)
- [MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08560/) (2023)
- [GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14734/) (2025)
- [Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07753/) (2022)
- [Inner Monologue: Embodied Reasoning through Planning with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05608/) (2022)
- [A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12110/) (2025)
- [VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05973/) (2023)
- [MemoryBank: Enhancing Large Language Models with Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10250/) (2023)
- [COMET: Commonsense Transformers for Automatic Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05317/) (2019)
- [Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09542/) (2023)
- [SayPlan: Grounding Large Language Models using 3D Scene Graphs for Scalable Robot Task Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06135/) (2023)
- [Building Cooperative Embodied Agents Modularly with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02485/) (2023)
- [Habitat 3.0: A Co-Habitat for Humans, Avatars and Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13724/) (2023)
- [EmbodiedBench: Comprehensive Benchmarking Multi-modal Large Language Models for Vision-Driven Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09560/) (2025)
- [REFLECT: Summarizing Robot Experiences for Failure Explanation and Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15724/) (2023)
- [Improving Passage Retrieval with Zero-Shot Question Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07496/) (2022)
- [Query2doc: Query Expansion with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07678/) (2023)
- [Watch-And-Help: A Challenge for Social Perception and Human-AI Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09890/) (2020)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Long Context Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17407/) (2025)
- [HomeRobot: Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11565/) (2023)
- [PARTNR: A Benchmark for Planning and Reasoning in Embodied Multi-agent Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00081/) (2024)
- [Beyond the Limits: A Survey of Techniques to Extend the Context Length in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02244/) (2024)
- [Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Models: Concepts, Progress, Applications and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04769/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Memory in the Age of AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13564/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Context Engineering for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13334/) (2025)
- [Anatomy of Agentic Memory: Taxonomy and Empirical Analysis of Evaluation and System Limitations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19320/) (2026)
- [PAC-BENCH: Evaluating Multi-Agent Collaboration under Privacy Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11523/) (2026)
- [Bring My Cup! Personalizing Vision-Language-Action Models with Visual Attentive Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20014/) (2025)
- [WorldLines: Benchmarking and Modeling Long-Horizon Stateful Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18847/) (2026)
- [FragFuse: Bypassing Access Control of Large Language Model Agents via Memory-Based Query Fragmentation and Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15609/) (2026)
- [EMBGuard: Constructing Hazard-Aware Guardrails for Safe Planning in Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30924/) (2026)
- [Designing Memory-Augmented AR Agents for Spatiotemporal Reasoning in Personalized Task Assistance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08774/) (2025)
- [Towards Direct Evaluation of Harness Optimizers via Priority Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22505/) (2026)
- [Apples on the Table? Evaluating Text-Guided 3D Scene Synthesis via Fine-Grained Constraint Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03001/) (2025)
- [TaskGround: Structured Executable Task Inference for Full-Scene Household Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18109/) (2026)
- [Personalizing Embodied Multimodal Large Language Model Agents over Long-term User Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26256/) (2026)
- [Towards Trustworthy Physical Intelligence: From Theory to Practice Across Life Cycle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22877/) (2026)
- [FoundYou: A Unified Model for Personalized Segmentation and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29917/) (2026)
- [PRAGMA: Evaluating Personalized Guidance with Memory Alignment in Lifelong Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.09664/) (2026)
- [EMBER-Bench: Benchmarking Cross-Event Causal Memory in Long-Horizon Embodied Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05013/) (2026)
- [Sibyl: An Efficient Small-large Model Collaboration Framework for Long-horizon Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05383/) (2026)
- [MemCo: Memory-Centric Collaboration for Generalizing LLM Agents to Unseen Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07376/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

LLM-powered embodied agents have shown success on conventional object-rearrangement tasks, but providing personalized assistance that leverages user-specific knowledge from past interactions presents new challenges. We investigate these challenges through the lens of agents' memory utilization along two critical dimensions: object semantics (identifying objects based on personal meaning) and user patterns (recalling sequences from behavioral routines). To assess these capabilities, we construct MEMENTO, an end-to-end two-stage evaluation framework comprising single-memory and joint-memory tasks. Our experiments reveal that current agents can recall simple object semantics but struggle to apply sequential user patterns to planning. Through in-depth analysis, we identify two critical bottlenecks: information overload and coordination failures when handling multiple memories. Based on these findings, we explore memory architectural approaches to address these challenges. Given our observation that episodic memory provides both personalized knowledge and in-context learning benefits, we design a hierarchical knowledge graph-based user-profile memory module that separately manages personalized knowledge, achieving substantial improvements on both single and joint-memory tasks. Project website: https://connoriginal.github.io/MEMENTO