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Main Authors: Liu, Chengzhi, Yang, Yuzhe, Pu, Sophia Xiao, Liu, Yepeng, Long, Lin, Guo, Yichen, Chen, Nuo, Weng, Zhaotian, Kochkina, Elena, Kaur, Simerjot, Smiley, Charese, Liu, Xiaomo, Zou, James, Liu, Sheng, Bu, Yuheng, Peng, Songyou, Wang, Xin Eric
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29341
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author Liu, Chengzhi
Yang, Yuzhe
Pu, Sophia Xiao
Liu, Yepeng
Long, Lin
Guo, Yichen
Chen, Nuo
Weng, Zhaotian
Kochkina, Elena
Kaur, Simerjot
Smiley, Charese
Liu, Xiaomo
Zou, James
Liu, Sheng
Bu, Yuheng
Peng, Songyou
Wang, Xin Eric
author_facet Liu, Chengzhi
Yang, Yuzhe
Pu, Sophia Xiao
Liu, Yepeng
Long, Lin
Guo, Yichen
Chen, Nuo
Weng, Zhaotian
Kochkina, Elena
Kaur, Simerjot
Smiley, Charese
Liu, Xiaomo
Zou, James
Liu, Sheng
Bu, Yuheng
Peng, Songyou
Wang, Xin Eric
contents Multimodal large language models are increasingly deployed as long-horizon agents, where memory must do more than recall: it must track an evolving world, revise what has gone stale, and surface the right evidence at decision time. Existing benchmarks measure recall over static dialogue, collapse memory into a single end-of-task accuracy, and reduce visual observations to captions, leaving us unable to localize failures to writing, maintenance, retrieval, or use. The rise of agent harnesses that author their own memory sharpens this gap, since we have no principled way to compare hand-designed pipelines with self-managing alternatives. To close these gaps, we formulate multimodal agent memory as an Action-World Interaction Loop with an observable four-stage lifecycle, and instantiate it in WorldMemArena: 400 multi-session multimodal tasks spanning Lifelong Evolution (evolving personal and task states) and Agentic Execution (memory from real observations, actions, and feedback), annotated with gold memory points, updates, distractors, and evidence chains for stage-level diagnosis. This enables the first head-to-head comparison of long-context, manually designed (RAG and external memory systems), and harness-based memory agents. Results show that: (1) better memory writing and storage do not guarantee better performance; (2) multimodal memory still struggles to fully use visual evidence; (3) systems are unstable across domains and degrade on realistic agentic trajectories; and (4) harness memory is more flexible but remains costly and less reliable.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_29341
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle WorldMemArena: Evaluating Multimodal Agent Memory Through Action-World Interaction
Liu, Chengzhi
Yang, Yuzhe
Pu, Sophia Xiao
Liu, Yepeng
Long, Lin
Guo, Yichen
Chen, Nuo
Weng, Zhaotian
Kochkina, Elena
Kaur, Simerjot
Smiley, Charese
Liu, Xiaomo
Zou, James
Liu, Sheng
Bu, Yuheng
Peng, Songyou
Wang, Xin Eric
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Multimodal large language models are increasingly deployed as long-horizon agents, where memory must do more than recall: it must track an evolving world, revise what has gone stale, and surface the right evidence at decision time. Existing benchmarks measure recall over static dialogue, collapse memory into a single end-of-task accuracy, and reduce visual observations to captions, leaving us unable to localize failures to writing, maintenance, retrieval, or use. The rise of agent harnesses that author their own memory sharpens this gap, since we have no principled way to compare hand-designed pipelines with self-managing alternatives. To close these gaps, we formulate multimodal agent memory as an Action-World Interaction Loop with an observable four-stage lifecycle, and instantiate it in WorldMemArena: 400 multi-session multimodal tasks spanning Lifelong Evolution (evolving personal and task states) and Agentic Execution (memory from real observations, actions, and feedback), annotated with gold memory points, updates, distractors, and evidence chains for stage-level diagnosis. This enables the first head-to-head comparison of long-context, manually designed (RAG and external memory systems), and harness-based memory agents. Results show that: (1) better memory writing and storage do not guarantee better performance; (2) multimodal memory still struggles to fully use visual evidence; (3) systems are unstable across domains and degrade on realistic agentic trajectories; and (4) harness memory is more flexible but remains costly and less reliable.
title WorldMemArena: Evaluating Multimodal Agent Memory Through Action-World Interaction
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29341