📝 SummarXiv

Abstract

Large Language Model (LLM) agents excel at multi-step, tool-augmented tasks. However, smart homes introduce distinct challenges, requiring agents to handle latent user intents, temporal dependencies, device constraints, scheduling, and more. The main bottlenecks for developing smart home agents with such capabilities include the lack of a realistic simulation environment where agents can interact with devices and observe the results, as well as a challenging benchmark to evaluate them. To address this, we introduce $\textbf{SimuHome}$, a time-accelerated home environment that simulates smart devices, supports API calls, and reflects changes in environmental variables. By building the simulator on the Matter protocol (the global industry standard for smart home communication), SimuHome provides a high-fidelity environment, and agents validated in SimuHome can be deployed on real Matter-compliant devices with minimal adaptation. We provide a challenging benchmark of 600 episodes across twelve user query types that require the aforementioned capabilities. Our evaluation of 11 agents under a unified ReAct framework reveals that while models perform well on simple tasks, they struggle with latent intent inference, state verification, and especially temporal scheduling. Even the top-performing model, GPT-4.1, reaches only 54% success rate. These findings highlight a critical need for methods that can reliably verify the current state via tools before acting and coordinate time-dependent actions.