When the Past Shapes Action: Understanding Embodied Memory

This paper surveys embodied memory as a mechanism for agents to retain, retrieve, and update information from past observations beyond immediate perception. It organizes existing approaches into six fundamental requirements (world-state persistence, task progress, belief maintenance, experiential learning) and eight architectural categories (recurrent states, fast weights, visual/symbolic representations, spatial memory, experience-based systems). The authors analyze capabilities, limitations, and benchmark evaluations to distinguish genuine memory use from general performance, identifying open challenges in experience selection, belief consistency, and knowledge consolidation for lifelong embodied intelligence.