@inproceedings{li-etal-2026-emembench,
title = "{EM}em{B}ench: Interactive Benchmarking of Episodic Memory for {VLM} Agents",
author = "Li, Xinze and
Zhu, Ziyue and
Liu, Siyuan and
Ma, Yubo and
Zang, Yuhang and
Cao, Yixin and
Sun, Aixin",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {EMNLP} 2026",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.905/",
pages = "19163--19192",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-462-0",
abstract = "We introduce EMemBench, a programmatic benchmark generator for evaluating long-term episodic memory of agents through interactive games. Rather than using a fixed set of questions, EMemBench generates questions from environment-grounded trajectories, covering both text-only and visual game environments. Each template computes verifiable ground truth from underlying game signals, with controlled answerability and balanced coverage over memory skills: single/multi-hop recall, induction, temporal, spatial, logical, and adversarial. We evaluate memory agents with strong LMs/VLMs as backbones, using in-context prompting as baselines. Across 15 text games and multiple visual seeds, results are far from saturated: induction and spatial reasoning are persistent bottlenecks, especially in visual settings. Persistent memory yields clear gains for open backbones on text games, but improvements are less consistent for VLM agents, suggesting that visually grounded episodic memory remains an open challenge. A human study further contextualizes the difficulty and interpretability of EMemBench."
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T EMemBench: Interactive Benchmarking of Episodic Memory for VLM Agents
%A Li, Xinze
%A Zhu, Ziyue
%A Liu, Siyuan
%A Ma, Yubo
%A Zang, Yuhang
%A Cao, Yixin
%A Sun, Aixin
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-462-0
%F li-etal-2026-emembench
%X We introduce EMemBench, a programmatic benchmark generator for evaluating long-term episodic memory of agents through interactive games. Rather than using a fixed set of questions, EMemBench generates questions from environment-grounded trajectories, covering both text-only and visual game environments. Each template computes verifiable ground truth from underlying game signals, with controlled answerability and balanced coverage over memory skills: single/multi-hop recall, induction, temporal, spatial, logical, and adversarial. We evaluate memory agents with strong LMs/VLMs as backbones, using in-context prompting as baselines. Across 15 text games and multiple visual seeds, results are far from saturated: induction and spatial reasoning are persistent bottlenecks, especially in visual settings. Persistent memory yields clear gains for open backbones on text games, but improvements are less consistent for VLM agents, suggesting that visually grounded episodic memory remains an open challenge. A human study further contextualizes the difficulty and interpretability of EMemBench.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.905/
%P 19163-19192
Markdown (Informal)
[EMemBench: Interactive Benchmarking of Episodic Memory for VLM Agents](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.905/) (Li et al., Findings 2026)
ACL