PersonalHomeBench: Evaluating Agents in Personalized Smart Homes

arXiv cs.AI / 4/21/2026

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Key Points

  • The article introduces PersonalHomeBench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate foundation models acting as agentic assistants in personalized smart-home settings.
  • The benchmark is built via an iterative setup that constructs increasingly rich household states and uses them to generate personalized, context-dependent tasks.
  • It pairs the benchmark with PersonalHomeTools, a toolbox that supports household information retrieval, appliance control, and situational understanding to enable realistic agent-environment interaction.
  • Experiments assess both reactive and proactive agent behaviors under unimodal and multimodal observations, showing performance declines as task complexity rises.
  • The study finds major weaknesses in counterfactual reasoning and in partially observable scenarios, where agents need effective tool-based information gathering.

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.