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Oct 23

Web$hell: A Unified Interface for Agentic Web Access

Large language model (LLM) agents are becoming direct users of the open web. As they take on increasingly complex and information-intensive tasks, effective web access is becoming a core capability for agentic problem solving. Existing approaches have advanced agentic web access through different access models, including search-augmented agents, browser-based agents, and, more recently, filesystem-based agents. Nevertheless, as users expect agents to complete long-horizon, end-to-end tasks, they increasingly need to conduct broad information gathering, perform browser actions, and revisit acquired evidence within a single trajectory. Yet our preliminary analyses reveal that existing access models struggle to meet these demands. They primarily support either information gathering or browser interaction, while combining their capabilities can involve substantial costs or performance trade-offs. To this end, we present Web\hell, an interface that unifies web access under a single access model. Using a common schema defined by WebContract, WebCompiler compiles live webpages into addressable information and action objects. These objects are maintained in WebCache and handled through a shared set of operations, providing agents with consistent, operable, and persistent web access. Through extensive experiments across web search, web navigation, and deep research benchmarks, we show that Webhell achieves strong task performance at lower cost. Our results further indicate the importance of interface design for effective web access, with Web\$hell opening new possibilities for more capable and efficient LLM agents on the web.

NNetscape Navigator: Complex Demonstrations for Web Agents Without a Demonstrator

We introduce NNetscape Navigator (NNetnav), a method for training web agents entirely through synthetic demonstrations. These demonstrations are collected by first interacting with a browser to generate trajectory rollouts, which are then retroactively labeled into instructions using a language model. Most work on training browser agents has relied on expensive human supervision, and the limited previous work on such interaction-first synthetic data techniques has failed to provide effective search through the exponential space of exploration. In contrast, NNetnav exploits the hierarchical structure of language instructions to make this search more tractable: complex instructions are typically decomposable into simpler subtasks, allowing NNetnav to automatically prune interaction episodes when an intermediate trajectory cannot be annotated with a meaningful sub-task. We use NNetnav demonstrations from a language model for supervised fine-tuning of a smaller language model policy, and find improvements of 6 points on WebArena and over 20 points on MiniWoB++, two popular environments for web-agents. Notably, on WebArena, we observe that language model policies can be further enhanced when fine-tuned with NNetnav demonstrations derived from the same language model. Finally, we collect and release a dataset of over 6k NNetnav demonstrations on WebArena, spanning a diverse and complex set of instructions.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 3, 2024

Deep Search in Real-World Web Environments

Despite substantial progress in Deep Search agents, their ability to conduct end-to-end research in real-world open Web environments remains insufficiently evaluated. Unlike static retrieval settings, information on the real-world Web is distributed across diverse sources, modalities, and heterogeneous formats, often involving complex interaction mechanisms that require agents to autonomously search for, access, and integrate relevant evidence during execution. To address this gap, we introduce the OpenDS task, designed to evaluate agents' ability to perform multi-step deep search in the live, open Web. This task requires agents to autonomously explore the real Web, discover and connect relevant evidence from multiple independent sources through Web search, browser interaction, and evidence processing, and ultimately determine a unique factual answer. Building on this task formulation, we construct OpenDS-World, a benchmark comprising 200 challenging tasks spanning diverse information modalities, heterogeneous file formats, and interactive access requirements, with independent human verification to ensure evidence validity and answer uniqueness. We evaluate 12 frontier models under a unified tool environment and execution protocol. The best-performing model achieves 39.0% accuracy, while human evaluation across 1,000 independent attempts yields 21.1% accuracy. Further analyses of tool usage, search cost, termination behavior, and failure recovery reveal substantial differences in research strategies across models, as well as persistent challenges in tool coordination and long-horizon search management. OpenDS-World provides a unified evaluation platform for systematically assessing and advancing agents' autonomous deep search capabilities in real-world open Web environments.

  • 25 authors
·
Oct 18 1

From Runnable to Shippable: Multi-Agent Test-Driven Development for Generating Full-Stack Web Applications from Requirements

Coding agents can generate web applications from natural-language descriptions, yet a recent benchmark study shows that generated applications fail to meet functional requirements in over 70% of cases. The core difficulty is that web correctness cannot be assessed from source files or terminal output: the application must be deployed, exercised through simulated browser interactions, and failures must be translated into actionable repair signals -- steps that current agents cannot perform without human mediation. We present TDDev, a framework that automates this closed loop through three stages: (1) converting high-level requirements into structured acceptance tests before any code is written, (2) deploying the application and validating it through browser-based interaction simulation, and (3) translating browser-observed failures into structured repair reports for the coding agent. Enabled by TDDev, we conduct the first controlled empirical study of Test-driven development (TDD) strategies for web application generation, comparing four development protocols across two coding agents, two backbone models, and two benchmarks. TDD infrastructure consistently improves generation quality by 34--48 percentage points over a no-TDD baseline. The central finding is that the optimal protocol depends on the model's generation style: models that build applications holistically benefit most from agentic enforcement, while models that extend code conservatively benefit from incremental enforcement. Mismatching protocol to generation style eliminates the TDD benefit entirely while multiplying token cost up to 25-fold. A user study confirms that TDDev reduces manual developer intervention to zero, shifting the workload from continuous prompt engineering to autonomous, feedback-driven refinement.

PageGuide: Browser extension to assist users in navigating a webpage and locating information

Users browsing the web daily struggle to quickly locate relevant information in cluttered pages, complete unfamiliar multi-step tasks, and stay focused amid distracting content. State-of-the-art AI assistants (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) and browser agents (e.g., OpenAI Operator, Browser Use) can answer questions and automate actions, yet they return answers without showing where the information comes from on the page, forcing users to manually verify results and blindly trust every automated steps. We present PageGuide, a browser extension that grounds LLM answers directly in the HTML DOM via visual overlays, addressing three core user needs: (a) Find-locating and highlighting relevant evidence in-situ so users can instantly verify answers on the page; (b) Guide-showing step-by-step instructions (e.g. how to change password) one at a time so users can follow and perform actions by themselves; and (c) Hide-hiding distracting content-giving users a chance to decide to hide an element or not. In a user study (N=94), PageGuide outperform unaided browsing across all modes: Hide accuracy improve by 26 percentage points (86.7% relative gain) and task completion time drops by 70%; Guide completion rate increases by 30 percentage points; and Find reduces manual search effort, with Ctrl+F usage falling by 80% and task time decreasing by 19%. Code and demo is at: pageguide.github.io.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 25 3

What It Is, Not What It Says: Securing Agentic Browsing Interactions with Web Semantics

AI agents increasingly browse the web on users' behalf, yet they consume webpages as screenshots or text, exposing their LLMs to unvetted third-party content. Browsers enforce semantics under which what an element can do depends on what it is and where it comes from, not on what it says. Agents flatten these semantics, so injected text can persuade the LLM to exercise the user's authority for content that has none. As LLMs remain easy to persuade, the agent's interface to the web must itself ensure the integrity of what the agent reads, interprets, and does. We propose Intact, which runs on an unmodified browser. Intact builds GenTree, a bespoke representation that captures provenance and web semantics. Intact passes the page via GenTree to the LLM one element at a time, so the LLM decides on each element without any other element's text. Its harness executes each step only within the capabilities of the step's element and asks the user before acting on third-party content. On 1,270 real webpages, GenTree attributes 2.3x as many elements to third parties as the browser, which misattributes 58.7% of them to the first party. On 1,091 of these webpages with injected attacks, only 12.8% of attacks get through Intact's planner, each at most as a consent request, against 73.1% for a conventional planner. Isolation disrupts functionality on only 3.7% of tasks, and a parallel schedule could remove most of its added latency.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 14 2

The OpenHands Software Agent SDK: A Composable and Extensible Foundation for Production Agents

Agents are now used widely in the process of software development, but building production-ready software engineering agents is a complex task. Deploying software agents effectively requires flexibility in implementation and experimentation, reliable and secure execution, and interfaces for users to interact with agents. In this paper, we present the OpenHands Software Agent SDK, a toolkit for implementing software development agents that satisfy these desiderata. This toolkit is a complete architectural redesign of the agent components of the popular OpenHands framework for software development agents, which has 64k+ GitHub stars. To achieve flexibility, we design a simple interface for implementing agents that requires only a few lines of code in the default case, but is easily extensible to more complex, full-featured agents with features such as custom tools, memory management, and more. For security and reliability, it delivers seamless local-to-remote execution portability, integrated REST/WebSocket services. For interaction with human users, it can connect directly to a variety of interfaces, such as visual workspaces (VS Code, VNC, browser), command-line interfaces, and APIs. Compared with existing SDKs from OpenAI, Claude, and Google, OpenHands uniquely integrates native sandboxed execution, lifecycle control, model-agnostic multi-LLM routing, and built-in security analysis. Empirical results on SWE-Bench Verified and GAIA benchmarks demonstrate strong performance. Put together, these elements allow the OpenHands Software Agent SDK to provide a practical foundation for prototyping, unlocking new classes of custom applications, and reliably deploying agents at scale.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 5, 2025

GameASG-Bench: Benchmarking Autonomous Software Generation for Game Development

Autonomous software generation (ASG) aims to turn human requirements into executable applications, but delivering these applications does not necessarily establish that their interacting components satisfy the specified behavioral requirements. We introduce GameASG-Bench, a benchmark that makes behavioral testability part of the generation task for game development. Our design declares an evaluation interface specification before generation, fixing legal starting scenarios, player-level actions, stable snapshots, rejection behavior, and invariants while leaving private implementations open. Concretely, we include: (i) static L1 checks that assess source-level compliance; and (ii) browser-executed L2 checks that combine semantic observations with real input and runtime evidence. We implement this protocol as 47 browser-native game-generation tasks spanning 12 primary genres and both 2D and 3D interaction, each with executable checks and an independently verified reference implementation. Our experiments answer four key questions about end-to-end agent performance, tool access and nominal turn budget, reasoning effort, and harness choice. Across nine agent stacks, the highest observed mean L2 check pass rate is 93.2%, yet the highest observed strict task success rate, requiring all L1 and applicable L2 prerequisite and core requirement checks, is only 55.3% (26/47 tasks). For DeepSeek-V4-Flash, full tool access and larger nominal turn budgets yield more strict task successes, while the strict task success rate is not monotonic in reasoning effort. Both tested harnesses achieve 18 strict task successes, but only ten tasks succeed under both. These results expose task-level compliance gaps that high average check pass rates actually obscure.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 17

AutoGLM: Autonomous Foundation Agents for GUIs

We present AutoGLM, a new series in the ChatGLM family, designed to serve as foundation agents for autonomous control of digital devices through Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). While foundation models excel at acquiring human knowledge, they often struggle with decision-making in dynamic real-world environments, limiting their progress toward artificial general intelligence. This limitation underscores the importance of developing foundation agents capable of learning through autonomous environmental interactions by reinforcing existing models. Focusing on Web Browser and Phone as representative GUI scenarios, we have developed AutoGLM as a practical foundation agent system for real-world GUI interactions. Our approach integrates a comprehensive suite of techniques and infrastructures to create deployable agent systems suitable for user delivery. Through this development, we have derived two key insights: First, the design of an appropriate "intermediate interface" for GUI control is crucial, enabling the separation of planning and grounding behaviors, which require distinct optimization for flexibility and accuracy respectively. Second, we have developed a novel progressive training framework that enables self-evolving online curriculum reinforcement learning for AutoGLM. Our evaluations demonstrate AutoGLM's effectiveness across multiple domains. For web browsing, AutoGLM achieves a 55.2% success rate on VAB-WebArena-Lite (improving to 59.1% with a second attempt) and 96.2% on OpenTable evaluation tasks. In Android device control, AutoGLM attains a 36.2% success rate on AndroidLab (VAB-Mobile) and 89.7% on common tasks in popular Chinese APPs.

  • 30 authors
·
Oct 28, 2024

MobileGym: A Verifiable and Highly Parallel Simulation Platform for Mobile GUI Agent Research

We present MobileGym, a browser-hosted, lightweight, fully controllable environment for everyday mobile use, targeting interaction fidelity without replicating proprietary backends. It enables two capabilities previously out of reach for everyday apps: verifiable outcome signals through deterministic state-based judging over structured JSON state, and scalable online RL through low-cost parallel rollouts. The full environment state is captured, configured, forked, and compared as structured JSON, and a single server can host hundreds of parallel instances, with about 400 MB memory per instance and about 3 s cold start. A layered state model and a declarative task-definition framework keep state programmability and task creation practical at scale, and a single programmatic judging mechanism delivers both deterministic evaluation verdicts and dense RL rewards. The accompanying MobileGym-Bench provides 416 parameterized task templates, including 256 test and 160 train templates, over 28 apps, with deterministic judges and a structured AnswerSheet protocol that avoids free-text matching failures. In a Sim-to-Real case study, GRPO on Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct gains +12.8 percentage points on the 256-task test set, and on a 59-task real-device signal subset, real-device execution retains 95.1% of the simulation-side training gain. Project page: https://mobilegym.github.io.

  • 11 authors
·
May 24 3

BrowserAgent: Building Web Agents with Human-Inspired Web Browsing Actions

Efficiently solving real-world problems with LLMs increasingly hinges on their ability to interact with dynamic web environments and autonomously acquire external information. While recent research like Search-R1 and WebDancer demonstrates strong performance in solving web tasks, they heavily rely on additional tools to convert the interactive web environment into static text content. This is in contrast to human browsing behaviors, which involve diverse interactions with the browser, such as scrolling, clicking, and typing. In this paper, we propose BrowserAgent, a more interactive agent that solves complex tasks through human-inspired browser actions. BrowserAgent operates directly on raw web pages via Playwright through a set of predefined browser actions. We adopt a two-stage training (Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Rejection Fine-Tuning (RFT)) to improve the model's generalization abilities. Despite using significantly less training data than Search-R1, BrowserAgent achieves more competitive results across different Open-QA tasks. Additionally, we introduce an explicit memory mechanism to store key conclusions across steps, further enhancing the model's reasoning capabilities for long-horizon tasks. Notably, BrowserAgent-7B can achieve around 20\% improvement over Search-R1 on multi-hop QA tasks like HotpotQA, 2Wiki, and Bamboogle. These results indicate that BrowserAgent can serve as a more advanced framework for more interactive and scalable web agents.

TIGER-Lab TIGER-Lab
·
Oct 12, 2025 2

RISK: A Framework for GUI Agents in E-commerce Risk Management

E-commerce risk management requires aggregating diverse, deeply embedded web data through multi-step, stateful interactions, which traditional scraping methods and most existing Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents cannot handle. These agents are typically limited to single-step tasks and lack the ability to manage dynamic, interactive content critical for effective risk assessment. To address this challenge, we introduce RISK, a novel framework designed to build and deploy GUI agents for this domain. RISK integrates three components: (1) RISK-Data, a dataset of 8,492 single-step and 2,386 multi-step interaction trajectories, collected through a high-fidelity browser framework and a meticulous data curation process; (2) RISK-Bench, a benchmark with 802 single-step and 320 multi-step trajectories across three difficulty levels for standardized evaluation; and (3) RISK-R1, a R1-style reinforcement fine-tuning framework considering four aspects: (i) Output Format Constraint, (ii) Single-step and (iii) Multi-step Level Reward, and (iv) Task Level Reweight. Experiments show that RISK-R1 achieves a 6.8% improvement in offline single-step and an 8.8% improvement in offline multi-step, using only 7.2% of the parameters of the SOTA baseline. Moreover, it attains a top task success rate of 70.5% in online evaluation. RISK provides a scalable, domain-specific solution for automating complex web interactions in e-commerce risk management. The code is available at https://github.com/RenqiChen/RISK-GUI.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 12

WebCoder: Scaling General Frontend Development with Artifact-Grounded Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Real-world frontend development requires agents to compose reproduction, generation, modification, and repair over an evolving application state. Learning a general policy for this process requires translating heterogeneous execution feedback into task-aligned rewards and effective credit assignment across long sequences of interdependent actions. We introduce WebCoder, a general frontend development agent trained with artifact-grounded agentic reinforcement learning. Our key idea is to assess diverse development activities through their effects on a shared executable artifact and its satisfaction of task requirements. We build Webdev-World, an executable environment that integrates code editing, application execution, browser inspection, and on-demand skills while preserving project state across interactions. An independent verifier evaluates the final application against task requirements to provide terminal rewards, while changes in intermediate artifact progress redistribute the resulting rollout advantage across development segments. Context compaction and message-tree sample construction support training on trajectories beyond a single context window while avoiding repeated loss computation on shared generated history. We further introduce Webdev-Bench to evaluate composed development requirements within a single project. On Webdev-Bench, WebCoder-27B raises requirement satisfaction from 64.8 for its Qwen3.8-27B base model to 72.8, exceeding Claude-Opus-4.8 (65.1) and GPT-5.4 (59.6); on Vision2Web, it improves the average visual and functional score from 41.1 to 62.4, on par with Claude-Opus-4.8. Ablation studies confirm the contributions of artifact-grounded credit assignment and long-horizon training.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 15

Mobile-Agent-v3.5: Multi-platform Fundamental GUI Agents

The paper introduces GUI-Owl-1.5, the latest native GUI agent model that features instruct/thinking variants in multiple sizes (2B/4B/8B/32B/235B) and supports a range of platforms (desktop, mobile, browser, and more) to enable cloud-edge collaboration and real-time interaction. GUI-Owl-1.5 achieves state-of-the-art results on more than 20+ GUI benchmarks on open-source models: (1) on GUI automation tasks, it obtains 56.5 on OSWorld, 71.6 on AndroidWorld, and 48.4 on WebArena; (2) on grounding tasks, it obtains 80.3 on ScreenSpotPro; (3) on tool-calling tasks, it obtains 47.6 on OSWorld-MCP, and 46.8 on MobileWorld; (4) on memory and knowledge tasks, it obtains 75.5 on GUI-Knowledge Bench. GUI-Owl-1.5 incorporates several key innovations: (1) Hybird Data Flywheel: we construct the data pipeline for UI understanding and trajectory generation based on a combination of simulated environments and cloud-based sandbox environments, in order to improve the efficiency and quality of data collection. (2) Unified Enhancement of Agent Capabilities: we use a unified thought-synthesis pipeline to enhance the model's reasoning capabilities, while placing particular emphasis on improving key agent abilities, including Tool/MCP use, memory and multi-agent adaptation; (3) Multi-platform Environment RL Scaling: We propose a new environment RL algorithm, MRPO, to address the challenges of multi-platform conflicts and the low training efficiency of long-horizon tasks. The GUI-Owl-1.5 models are open-sourced, and an online cloud-sandbox demo is available at https://github.com/X-PLUG/MobileAgent.

AlibabaTongyiLab TongyiLab
·
Feb 14 3

InteractComp: Evaluating Search Agents With Ambiguous Queries

Language agents have demonstrated remarkable potential in web search and information retrieval. However, these search agents assume user queries are complete and unambiguous, an assumption that diverges from reality where users begin with incomplete queries requiring clarification through interaction. Yet most agents lack interactive mechanisms during the search process, and existing benchmarks cannot assess this capability. To address this gap, we introduce InteractComp, a benchmark designed to evaluate whether search agents can recognize query ambiguity and actively interact to resolve it during search. Following the principle of easy to verify, interact to disambiguate, we construct 210 expert-curated questions across 9 domains through a target-distractor methodology that creates genuine ambiguity resolvable only through interaction. Evaluation of 17 models reveals striking failure: the best model achieves only 13.73% accuracy despite 71.50% with complete context, exposing systematic overconfidence rather than reasoning deficits. Forced interaction produces dramatic gains, demonstrating latent capability current strategies fail to engage. Longitudinal analysis shows interaction capabilities stagnated over 15 months while search performance improved seven-fold, revealing a critical blind spot. This stagnation, coupled with the immediate feedback inherent to search tasks, makes InteractComp a valuable resource for both evaluating and training interaction capabilities in search agents. The code is available at https://github.com/FoundationAgents/InteractComp.

  • 25 authors
·
Oct 28, 2025 2

AgentClick: A Skill-Based Human-in-the-Loop Review Layer for Terminal AI Agents

Recent autonomous AI agents such as Codex, and Claude Code have made it increasingly practical for users to delegate complex tasks, including writing emails, executing code, issuing shell commands, and carrying out multi-step plans. However, despite these capabilities, human-agent interaction still largely happens through terminal interfaces or remote text-based channels such as Discord. These interaction modes are often inefficient and unfriendly: long text outputs are difficult to read and review, proposed actions lack clear structure and visual context, and users must express feedback by typing detailed corrections, which is cumbersome and often discourages effective collaboration. As a result, non-expert users in particular face a high barrier to working productively with agents. To address this gap, we present AgentClick, an interactive review layer for terminal-based agents. AgentClick is implemented as a localhost npm server paired with a skill-based plugin that connects the running agent to a browser interface, allowing users to supervise and collaborate with agents through a structured web UI rather than raw terminal text alone. The system supports a range of human-in-the-loop workflows, including email drafting and revision, plan review and modification, memory management, trajectory inspection and visualization, and error localization during agent execution. It also turns code generation and execution into a reviewable process, enabling users to inspect and intervene before consequential actions are taken. In addition, AgentClick supports persistent preference capture through editable memory and remote access over HTTP, allowing users to review agents running on servers from their personal devices. Our goal is to lower the barrier for non-expert users and improve the efficiency and quality of human-agent co-work.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 14

UI2App: Benchmarking Visual Interaction Inference in Executable Web Application Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated growing competence in web page generation. However, existing text-driven approaches rely on complex prompts that impose substantial demands on users and offer limited expressivity for page layout and cross-page visual coherence. Image-driven paradigms, which take UI screenshots as input, align more closely with real development workflows. However, current benchmarks focus primarily on visual fidelity and lack a systematic evaluation of the interaction capabilities in generated artifacts. To address this gap, we introduce UI2App, the first benchmark targeting interaction inference, the ability to recover application behavior from screenshots alone, without any textual or behavioral guidance. UI2App comprises 327 screenshots grouped into 45 state-coherent screenshot sets for runnable multi-route web applications. We design an end-to-end pipeline that evaluates each artifact along four dimensions: executability, navigation reachability, visual fidelity, and interaction inference. The interaction metric (IIS) assesses inferred interactions by functional correctness and state-management complexity, crediting any valid implementation rather than matching a single reference. Experiments on six frontier vision-language models reveal a marked capability mismatch between visual reconstruction and interaction realization: the visual-fidelity leader scores only 7.5 on IIS, ranking fourth and trailing the IIS leader by 5.2x. High-complexity interactions such as cross-page state remain a pervasive bottleneck, with half of the evaluated models scoring exactly zero on this dimension. Overall, the results indicate that inferring complete interaction behavior from static screenshots remains a key challenge for models.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 6 2

Build the web for agents, not agents for the web

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal counterparts have spurred significant interest in developing web agents -- AI systems capable of autonomously navigating and completing tasks within web environments. While holding tremendous promise for automating complex web interactions, current approaches face substantial challenges due to the fundamental mismatch between human-designed interfaces and LLM capabilities. Current methods struggle with the inherent complexity of web inputs, whether processing massive DOM trees, relying on screenshots augmented with additional information, or bypassing the user interface entirely through API interactions. This position paper advocates for a paradigm shift in web agent research: rather than forcing web agents to adapt to interfaces designed for humans, we should develop a new interaction paradigm specifically optimized for agentic capabilities. To this end, we introduce the concept of an Agentic Web Interface (AWI), an interface specifically designed for agents to navigate a website. We establish six guiding principles for AWI design, emphasizing safety, efficiency, and standardization, to account for the interests of all primary stakeholders. This reframing aims to overcome fundamental limitations of existing interfaces, paving the way for more efficient, reliable, and transparent web agent design, which will be a collaborative effort involving the broader ML community.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 12, 2025 2

Permission Manifests for Web Agents

The rise of Large Language Model (LLM)-based web agents represents a significant shift in automated interactions with the web. Unlike traditional crawlers that follow simple conventions, such as robots.txt, modern agents engage with websites in sophisticated ways: navigating complex interfaces, extracting structured information, and completing end-to-end tasks. Existing governance mechanisms were not designed for these capabilities. Without a way to specify what interactions are and are not allowed, website owners increasingly rely on blanket blocking and CAPTCHAs, which undermine beneficial applications such as efficient automation, convenient use of e-commerce services, and accessibility tools. We introduce agent-permissions.json, a robots.txt-style lightweight manifest where websites specify allowed interactions, complemented by API references where available. This framework provides a low-friction coordination mechanism: website owners only need to write a simple JSON file, while agents can easily parse and automatically implement the manifest's provisions. Website owners can then focus on blocking non-compliant agents, rather than agents as a whole. By extending the spirit of robots.txt to the era of LLM-mediated interaction, and complementing data use initiatives such as AIPref, the manifest establishes a compliance framework that enables beneficial agent interactions while respecting site owners' preferences.

  • 13 authors
·
Dec 7, 2025

WebLINX: Real-World Website Navigation with Multi-Turn Dialogue

We propose the problem of conversational web navigation, where a digital agent controls a web browser and follows user instructions to solve real-world tasks in a multi-turn dialogue fashion. To support this problem, we introduce WEBLINX - a large-scale benchmark of 100K interactions across 2300 expert demonstrations of conversational web navigation. Our benchmark covers a broad range of patterns on over 150 real-world websites and can be used to train and evaluate agents in diverse scenarios. Due to the magnitude of information present, Large Language Models (LLMs) cannot process entire web pages in real-time. To solve this bottleneck, we design a retrieval-inspired model that efficiently prunes HTML pages by ranking relevant elements. We use the selected elements, along with screenshots and action history, to assess a variety of models for their ability to replicate human behavior when navigating the web. Our experiments span from small text-only to proprietary multimodal LLMs. We find that smaller finetuned decoders surpass the best zero-shot LLMs (including GPT-4V), but also larger finetuned multimodal models which were explicitly pretrained on screenshots. However, all finetuned models struggle to generalize to unseen websites. Our findings highlight the need for large multimodal models that can generalize to novel settings. Our code, data and models are available for research: https://mcgill-nlp.github.io/weblinx

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 8, 2024 4

Refusal-Trained LLMs Are Easily Jailbroken As Browser Agents

For safety reasons, large language models (LLMs) are trained to refuse harmful user instructions, such as assisting dangerous activities. We study an open question in this work: does the desired safety refusal, typically enforced in chat contexts, generalize to non-chat and agentic use cases? Unlike chatbots, LLM agents equipped with general-purpose tools, such as web browsers and mobile devices, can directly influence the real world, making it even more crucial to refuse harmful instructions. In this work, we primarily focus on red-teaming browser agents, LLMs that manipulate information via web browsers. To this end, we introduce Browser Agent Red teaming Toolkit (BrowserART), a comprehensive test suite designed specifically for red-teaming browser agents. BrowserART is consist of 100 diverse browser-related harmful behaviors (including original behaviors and ones sourced from HarmBench [Mazeika et al., 2024] and AirBench 2024 [Zeng et al., 2024b]) across both synthetic and real websites. Our empirical study on state-of-the-art browser agents reveals that, while the backbone LLM refuses harmful instructions as a chatbot, the corresponding agent does not. Moreover, attack methods designed to jailbreak refusal-trained LLMs in the chat settings transfer effectively to browser agents. With human rewrites, GPT-4o and o1-preview-based browser agents attempted 98 and 63 harmful behaviors (out of 100), respectively. We publicly release BrowserART and call on LLM developers, policymakers, and agent developers to collaborate on improving agent safety

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 11, 2024

Agentic Web: Weaving the Next Web with AI Agents

The emergence of AI agents powered by large language models (LLMs) marks a pivotal shift toward the Agentic Web, a new phase of the internet defined by autonomous, goal-driven interactions. In this paradigm, agents interact directly with one another to plan, coordinate, and execute complex tasks on behalf of users. This transition from human-driven to machine-to-machine interaction allows intent to be delegated, relieving users from routine digital operations and enabling a more interactive, automated web experience. In this paper, we present a structured framework for understanding and building the Agentic Web. We trace its evolution from the PC and Mobile Web eras and identify the core technological foundations that support this shift. Central to our framework is a conceptual model consisting of three key dimensions: intelligence, interaction, and economics. These dimensions collectively enable the capabilities of AI agents, such as retrieval, recommendation, planning, and collaboration. We analyze the architectural and infrastructural challenges involved in creating scalable agentic systems, including communication protocols, orchestration strategies, and emerging paradigms such as the Agent Attention Economy. We conclude by discussing the potential applications, societal risks, and governance issues posed by agentic systems, and outline research directions for developing open, secure, and intelligent ecosystems shaped by both human intent and autonomous agent behavior. A continuously updated collection of relevant studies for agentic web is available at: https://github.com/SafeRL-Lab/agentic-web.

  • 18 authors
·
Jul 28, 2025

BIRD-INTERACT: Re-imagining Text-to-SQL Evaluation for Large Language Models via Lens of Dynamic Interactions

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on single-turn text-to-SQL tasks, but real-world database applications predominantly require multi-turn interactions to handle ambiguous queries, execution errors, and evolving user requirements. Existing multi-turn benchmarks fall short by treating conversation histories as static context or limiting evaluation to read-only operations, failing to reflect production-grade database assistant challenges. We introduce BIRD-INTERACT, a benchmark that restores this realism through: (1) a comprehensive interaction environment coupling each database with a hierarchical knowledge base, metadata files, and a function-driven user simulator, enabling models to solicit clarifications, retrieve knowledge, and recover from errors without human supervision; (2) two evaluation settings consisting of a pre-defined conversational protocol (c-Interact) and an open-ended agentic setting (a-Interact) where models autonomously decide when to query the user simulator or explore the environment; (3) a challenging task suite covering the full CRUD spectrum for business-intelligence and operational use cases, guarded by executable test cases. Each task features ambiguous and follow-up sub-tasks requiring dynamic interaction. The suite comprises BIRD-INTERACT-FULL (600 tasks, up to 11,796 interactions) for comprehensive performance assessment, and BIRD-INTERACT-LITE (300 tasks with simplified databases) for detailed behavioral analysis and rapid method development. Our empirical results highlight BIRD-INTERACT's difficulty: GPT-5 completes only 8.67% of tasks in c-Interact and 17.00% in a-Interact. Analysis via memory grafting and Interaction Test-time Scaling validates the importance of effective interaction for complex, dynamic text-to-SQL tasks.

birdsql The BIRD Team
·
Oct 6, 2025 2

ColorAgent: Building A Robust, Personalized, and Interactive OS Agent

With the advancements in hardware, software, and large language model technologies, the interaction between humans and operating systems has evolved from the command-line interface to the rapidly emerging AI agent interactions. Building an operating system (OS) agent capable of executing user instructions and faithfully following user desires is becoming a reality. In this technical report, we present ColorAgent, an OS agent designed to engage in long-horizon, robust interactions with the environment while also enabling personalized and proactive user interaction. To enable long-horizon interactions with the environment, we enhance the model's capabilities through step-wise reinforcement learning and self-evolving training, while also developing a tailored multi-agent framework that ensures generality, consistency, and robustness. In terms of user interaction, we explore personalized user intent recognition and proactive engagement, positioning the OS agent not merely as an automation tool but as a warm, collaborative partner. We evaluate ColorAgent on the AndroidWorld and AndroidLab benchmarks, achieving success rates of 77.2% and 50.7%, respectively, establishing a new state of the art. Nonetheless, we note that current benchmarks are insufficient for a comprehensive evaluation of OS agents and propose further exploring directions in future work, particularly in the areas of evaluation paradigms, agent collaboration, and security. Our code is available at https://github.com/MadeAgents/mobile-use.

  • 23 authors
·
Oct 22, 2025 2

InteractWeb-Bench: Can Multimodal Agent Escape Blind Execution in Interactive Website Generation?

With the advancement of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and coding agents, the website development has shifted from manual programming to agent-based project-level code synthesis. Existing benchmarks rely on idealized assumptions, especially for well-structured, information-rich inputs and static execution settings. In contrast, real-world development is constrained by a critical bottleneck: the semantic misalignment between ambiguous, low-quality instructions from non-expert users and model understanding, which results in a failure mode that we term blind execution. To address this gap, we introduce InteractWeb-Bench, the first multimodal interactive benchmark for website generation under non-expert low-code user conditions. InteractWeb-Bench introduces four types of user agents and persona-driven instruction perturbations to systematically simulate diverse user behaviors, including ambiguity, redundancy, and contradiction, grounded in requirement engineering defect taxonomies. We develop an interactive execution environment for agents, featuring a unified action space comprising Clarify, Implement, Verify, and Submit, enabling iterative intent refinement, code synthesis, and visual feedback-based validation. Extensive experiments and analysis reveal that frontier MLLM-based agents remain trapped in blind execution, exposing limitations in intent recognition and adaptive interaction.

Interaction2Code: Benchmarking MLLM-based Interactive Webpage Code Generation from Interactive Prototyping

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on the design-to-code task, i.e., generating UI code from UI mock-ups. However, existing benchmarks only contain static web pages for evaluation and ignore the dynamic interaction, limiting the practicality, usability and user engagement of the generated webpages. To bridge these gaps, we present the first systematic investigation of MLLMs in generating interactive webpages. Specifically, we formulate the Interaction-to-Code task and establish the Interaction2Code benchmark, encompassing 127 unique webpages and 374 distinct interactions across 15 webpage types and 31 interaction categories. Through comprehensive experiments utilizing state-of-the-art (SOTA) MLLMs, evaluated via both automatic metrics and human assessments, we identify four critical limitations of MLLM on Interaction-to-Code task: (1) inadequate generation of interaction compared with full page, (2) prone to ten types of failure, (3) poor performance on visually subtle interactions, and (4) insufficient undestanding on interaction when limited to single-modality visual descriptions. To address these limitations, we propose four enhancement strategies: Interactive Element Highlighting, Failureaware Prompting (FAP), Visual Saliency Enhancement, and Visual-Textual Descriptions Combination, all aiming at improving MLLMs' performance on the Interaction-toCode task. The Interaction2Code benchmark and code are available in https://github. com/WebPAI/Interaction2Code.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 28

Dispider: Enabling Video LLMs with Active Real-Time Interaction via Disentangled Perception, Decision, and Reaction

Active Real-time interaction with video LLMs introduces a new paradigm for human-computer interaction, where the model not only understands user intent but also responds while continuously processing streaming video on the fly. Unlike offline video LLMs, which analyze the entire video before answering questions, active real-time interaction requires three capabilities: 1) Perception: real-time video monitoring and interaction capturing. 2) Decision: raising proactive interaction in proper situations, 3) Reaction: continuous interaction with users. However, inherent conflicts exist among the desired capabilities. The Decision and Reaction require a contrary Perception scale and grain, and the autoregressive decoding blocks the real-time Perception and Decision during the Reaction. To unify the conflicted capabilities within a harmonious system, we present Dispider, a system that disentangles Perception, Decision, and Reaction. Dispider features a lightweight proactive streaming video processing module that tracks the video stream and identifies optimal moments for interaction. Once the interaction is triggered, an asynchronous interaction module provides detailed responses, while the processing module continues to monitor the video in the meantime. Our disentangled and asynchronous design ensures timely, contextually accurate, and computationally efficient responses, making Dispider ideal for active real-time interaction for long-duration video streams. Experiments show that Dispider not only maintains strong performance in conventional video QA tasks, but also significantly surpasses previous online models in streaming scenario responses, thereby validating the effectiveness of our architecture. The code and model are released at https://github.com/Mark12Ding/Dispider.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 6, 2025 6

Magentic-UI: Towards Human-in-the-loop Agentic Systems

AI agents powered by large language models are increasingly capable of autonomously completing complex, multi-step tasks using external tools. Yet, they still fall short of human-level performance in most domains including computer use, software development, and research. Their growing autonomy and ability to interact with the outside world, also introduces safety and security risks including potentially misaligned actions and adversarial manipulation. We argue that human-in-the-loop agentic systems offer a promising path forward, combining human oversight and control with AI efficiency to unlock productivity from imperfect systems. We introduce Magentic-UI, an open-source web interface for developing and studying human-agent interaction. Built on a flexible multi-agent architecture, Magentic-UI supports web browsing, code execution, and file manipulation, and can be extended with diverse tools via Model Context Protocol (MCP). Moreover, Magentic-UI presents six interaction mechanisms for enabling effective, low-cost human involvement: co-planning, co-tasking, multi-tasking, action guards, and long-term memory. We evaluate Magentic-UI across four dimensions: autonomous task completion on agentic benchmarks, simulated user testing of its interaction capabilities, qualitative studies with real users, and targeted safety assessments. Our findings highlight Magentic-UI's potential to advance safe and efficient human-agent collaboration.

  • 20 authors
·
Jul 29, 2025

A New Role for Relevance: Guiding Corpus Interaction in Agentic Search

Relevance is a query-dependent estimate of whether a document or excerpt contains useful evidence. Existing retrieval agents use relevance to select top-k content, but document relevance alone cannot localize, compose, or verify the evidence required by complex questions. Direct Corpus Interaction (DCI) enables such fine-grained operations through grep-style exploration, but its relevance-agnostic search can expose useful clues late and delay convergence. Recent advances use relevance to narrow the corpus into a working space for interaction. Once interaction begins, however, relevance still does not directly guide which documents grep searches first or distinguish informative excerpts from a broad set of matches to let LLMs see them first. We introduce the Relevance-Aware RipGrep Search Agent (RARG), which turns relevance into an execution prior for corpus interaction. RARG provides coarse-to-fine relevance guidance: it orders documents for sequential 'ripgrep' traversal to expose globally relevant clues earlier, initializes promising entry points with query-relevant paragraphs, and reranks grep matches to surface informative excerpts that document-level ranking may otherwise obscure. Across challenging browse question answering and reasoning-intensive retrieval, RARG improves the accuracy--efficiency frontier over retrieval-based and direct-interaction agents. These results demonstrate that relevance-aware interaction enables faster and more reliable search convergence.

tencent Tencent
·
Jul 26 6

TETRIS: Towards Exploring the Robustness of Interactive Segmentation

Interactive segmentation methods rely on user inputs to iteratively update the selection mask. A click specifying the object of interest is arguably the most simple and intuitive interaction type, and thereby the most common choice for interactive segmentation. However, user clicking patterns in the interactive segmentation context remain unexplored. Accordingly, interactive segmentation evaluation strategies rely more on intuition and common sense rather than empirical studies (e.g., assuming that users tend to click in the center of the area with the largest error). In this work, we conduct a real user study to investigate real user clicking patterns. This study reveals that the intuitive assumption made in the common evaluation strategy may not hold. As a result, interactive segmentation models may show high scores in the standard benchmarks, but it does not imply that they would perform well in a real world scenario. To assess the applicability of interactive segmentation methods, we propose a novel evaluation strategy providing a more comprehensive analysis of a model's performance. To this end, we propose a methodology for finding extreme user inputs by a direct optimization in a white-box adversarial attack on the interactive segmentation model. Based on the performance with such adversarial user inputs, we assess the robustness of interactive segmentation models w.r.t click positions. Besides, we introduce a novel benchmark for measuring the robustness of interactive segmentation, and report the results of an extensive evaluation of dozens of models.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 8, 2024

SentinelBench: A Benchmark for Long-Running Monitoring Agents

AI agents are increasingly asked to carry out work that spans minutes, hours, or longer. Yet the default model of agent behavior is continuous action: issuing tool calls, refreshing pages, searching for alternatives, or otherwise trying to force progress. This is the wrong approach for many long-running tasks, which are better served by a strategy of sustained attention. Instead, agents should monitor an environment, notice when an external event makes progress possible, then respond promptly without wasting resources while waiting. To measure progress on this class of tasks, we introduce SentinelBench, an open-source benchmark for time-evolving monitoring tasks. SentinelBench contains 100 tasks across 10 synthetic web environments, including email, calendars, finance, professional networking, and entertainment. Each environment exposes a live web interface and replays a scripted sequence of events, requiring agents to navigate and reason about web pages whose state shifts underfoot. SentinelBench measures task completion, reaction time, and resource use, exposing the tradeoff between responsiveness and cost. We report results across three models and two browser-agent harnesses, establishing performance baselines for future comparison and demonstrating how agent design choices can dramatically impact key metrics. Together, these results show that SentinelBench distinguishes meaningful differences in agent behavior.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 4

Learn-by-interact: A Data-Centric Framework for Self-Adaptive Agents in Realistic Environments

Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have the potential to enhance human capabilities, assisting with digital tasks from sending emails to performing data analysis. The abilities of existing LLMs at such tasks are often hindered by the lack of high-quality agent data from the corresponding environments they interact with. We propose Learn-by-interact, a data-centric framework to adapt LLM agents to any given environments without human annotations. Learn-by-interact synthesizes trajectories of agent-environment interactions based on documentations, and constructs instructions by summarizing or abstracting the interaction histories, a process called backward construction. We assess the quality of our synthetic data by using them in both training-based scenarios and training-free in-context learning (ICL), where we craft innovative retrieval approaches optimized for agents. Extensive experiments on SWE-bench, WebArena, OSWorld and Spider2-V spanning across realistic coding, web, and desktop environments show the effectiveness of Learn-by-interact in various downstream agentic tasks -- baseline results are improved by up to 12.2\% for ICL with Claude-3.5 and 19.5\% for training with Codestral-22B. We further demonstrate the critical role of backward construction, which provides up to 14.0\% improvement for training. Our ablation studies demonstrate the efficiency provided by our synthesized data in ICL and the superiority of our retrieval pipeline over alternative approaches like conventional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We expect that Learn-by-interact will serve as a foundation for agent data synthesis as LLMs are increasingly deployed at real-world environments.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 18, 2025 2

Unified Dual-Intent Translation for Joint Modeling of Search and Recommendation

Recommendation systems, which assist users in discovering their preferred items among numerous options, have served billions of users across various online platforms. Intuitively, users' interactions with items are highly driven by their unchanging inherent intents (e.g., always preferring high-quality items) and changing demand intents (e.g., wanting a T-shirt in summer but a down jacket in winter). However, both types of intents are implicitly expressed in recommendation scenario, posing challenges in leveraging them for accurate intent-aware recommendations. Fortunately, in search scenario, often found alongside recommendation on the same online platform, users express their demand intents explicitly through their query words. Intuitively, in both scenarios, a user shares the same inherent intent and the interactions may be influenced by the same demand intent. It is therefore feasible to utilize the interaction data from both scenarios to reinforce the dual intents for joint intent-aware modeling. But the joint modeling should deal with two problems: 1) accurately modeling users' implicit demand intents in recommendation; 2) modeling the relation between the dual intents and the interactive items. To address these problems, we propose a novel model named Unified Dual-Intents Translation for joint modeling of Search and Recommendation (UDITSR). To accurately simulate users' demand intents in recommendation, we utilize real queries from search data as supervision information to guide its generation. To explicitly model the relation among the triplet <inherent intent, demand intent, interactive item>, we propose a dual-intent translation propagation mechanism to learn the triplet in the same semantic space via embedding translations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UDITSR outperforms SOTA baselines both in search and recommendation tasks.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 30, 2024

MiniAppBench: Evaluating the Shift from Text to Interactive HTML Responses in LLM-Powered Assistants

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) in code generation, human-AI interaction is evolving from static text responses to dynamic, interactive HTML-based applications, which we term MiniApps. These applications require models to not only render visual interfaces but also construct customized interaction logic that adheres to real-world principles. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on algorithmic correctness or static layout reconstruction, failing to capture the capabilities required for this new paradigm. To address this gap, we introduce MiniAppBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate principle-driven, interactive application generation. Sourced from a real-world application with 10M+ generations, MiniAppBench distills 500 tasks across six domains (e.g., Games, Science, and Tools). Furthermore, to tackle the challenge of evaluating open-ended interactions where no single ground truth exists, we propose MiniAppEval, an agentic evaluation framework. Leveraging browser automation, it performs human-like exploratory testing to systematically assess applications across three dimensions: Intention, Static, and Dynamic. Our experiments reveal that current LLMs still face significant challenges in generating high-quality MiniApps, while MiniAppEval demonstrates high alignment with human judgment, establishing a reliable standard for future research. Our code is available in github.com/MiniAppBench.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 10 2

ActionBert: Leveraging User Actions for Semantic Understanding of User Interfaces

As mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous, regularly interacting with a variety of user interfaces (UIs) is a common aspect of daily life for many people. To improve the accessibility of these devices and to enable their usage in a variety of settings, building models that can assist users and accomplish tasks through the UI is vitally important. However, there are several challenges to achieve this. First, UI components of similar appearance can have different functionalities, making understanding their function more important than just analyzing their appearance. Second, domain-specific features like Document Object Model (DOM) in web pages and View Hierarchy (VH) in mobile applications provide important signals about the semantics of UI elements, but these features are not in a natural language format. Third, owing to a large diversity in UIs and absence of standard DOM or VH representations, building a UI understanding model with high coverage requires large amounts of training data. Inspired by the success of pre-training based approaches in NLP for tackling a variety of problems in a data-efficient way, we introduce a new pre-trained UI representation model called ActionBert. Our methodology is designed to leverage visual, linguistic and domain-specific features in user interaction traces to pre-train generic feature representations of UIs and their components. Our key intuition is that user actions, e.g., a sequence of clicks on different UI components, reveals important information about their functionality. We evaluate the proposed model on a wide variety of downstream tasks, ranging from icon classification to UI component retrieval based on its natural language description. Experiments show that the proposed ActionBert model outperforms multi-modal baselines across all downstream tasks by up to 15.5%.

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 22, 2020

BEARCUBS: A benchmark for computer-using web agents

Modern web agents possess computer use abilities that allow them to interact with webpages by sending commands to a virtual keyboard and mouse. While such agents have considerable potential to assist human users with complex tasks, evaluating their capabilities in real-world settings poses a major challenge. To this end, we introduce BEARCUBS, a "small but mighty" benchmark of 111 information-seeking questions designed to evaluate a web agent's ability to search, browse, and identify factual information from the web. Unlike prior web agent benchmarks, solving BEARCUBS requires (1) accessing live web content rather than synthetic or simulated pages, which captures the unpredictability of real-world web interactions; and (2) performing a broad range of multimodal interactions (e.g., video understanding, 3D navigation) that cannot be bypassed via text-based workarounds. Each question in BEARCUBS has a corresponding short, unambiguous answer and a human-validated browsing trajectory, allowing for transparent evaluation of agent performance and strategies. A human study confirms that BEARCUBS questions are solvable but non-trivial (84.7% human accuracy), revealing search inefficiencies and domain knowledge gaps as common failure points. By contrast, state-of-the-art computer-using agents underperform, with the best-scoring system (OpenAI's Operator) reaching only 24.3% accuracy. These results highlight critical areas for improvement, including reliable source selection and more powerful multimodal capabilities. To facilitate future research, BEARCUBS will be updated periodically to replace invalid or contaminated questions, keeping the benchmark fresh for future generations of web agents.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 10, 2025

JoyAI-VL-Interaction: Real-Time Vision-Language Interaction Intelligence

Many moments in the real world do not wait for a user to ask. A fire starts on a security monitor, an expression flickers across a video call, or a product a viewer wants flashes by in a livestream. Yet today's large models remain mostly turn-based by design: they answer only when addressed, and even video-call apps that appear interactive still operate as question-answer systems, reacting only when polled or prompted. We argue for a different paradigm: a model that is present in the world like a person. It continuously watches what is happening now, decides on its own whether to speak or stay silent, interacts in real time, and delegates to a background model when the problem is hard. To advance interaction models and their adoption across domains, we make two fully open-sourced contributions. First, we release JoyAI-VL-Interaction, an 8B-scale, vision-first VL-interaction model. The model makes the response decision internally, choosing each second to stay silent, respond, or delegate to a background model, and it excels at vision-triggered responsiveness and time awareness. We pair it with a transferable training recipe, from which capabilities we never trained for emerge, such as guiding a shopper through changing app screens or improvising a lecture from a slide deck. Second, we release a complete, deployable system built around that model. The system streams any ongoing video into the model, making it genuinely present in the world. All other components are pluggable, including ASR/TTS modules, memory, visualization UI, and a background brain that can connect to any API or agent. Across six real-world scenarios, human raters prefer JoyAI-VL-Interaction over the in-app video-call assistants of Doubao and Gemini by a wide margin. To our knowledge, this is the first open, vision-driven interaction model released together with its training recipe, data, and complete deployable system.

CLI-Anything: Towards Agent-Native Computer Use

As large language models advance in reasoning and tool use capabilities, researchers increasingly seek to leverage them for computer use agents that can interact with existing software. The dominant approach develops GUI agents that control applications through visual interfaces: interpreting screenshots, locating UI elements, and executing mouse clicks to mimic human interaction. This GUI-centric paradigm fundamentally misaligns with agent capabilities. Current GUI agents struggle with brittle pixel-level interactions, timing dependencies, and coordinate-based actions that break with interface changes. They force agents to emulate human perceptual limitations rather than leverage their computational strengths in structured data processing and programmatic control. CLI-Anything argues for agent-native computer use design. Instead of forcing agents to navigate visual layouts, we create interfaces aligned with how agents naturally operate: through structured commands, explicit state representations, and deterministic feedback. We transform existing applications into command-line harnesses that preserve functionality while exposing machine-readable protocols optimized for AI-native interaction. This eliminates the lossy visual-to-computational translation that plagues GUI agents. Rather than building sophisticated screen readers and click simulators, we should redesign interaction paradigms around agent strengths: precise programmatic control and deterministic execution. We examine the methodology, architecture, evidence, and future directions for this agent-native transformation of computer use. We have built CLI-Hub as a comprehensive platform that operationalizes this agent-native computer use vision. The platform provides methodology, architecture, and infrastructure for this fundamental transformation of computer use.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 1

Interact-Custom: Customized Human Object Interaction Image Generation

Compositional Customized Image Generation aims to customize multiple target concepts within generation content, which has gained attention for its wild application. Existing approaches mainly concentrate on the target entity's appearance preservation, while neglecting the fine-grained interaction control among target entities. To enable the model of such interaction control capability, we focus on human object interaction scenario and propose the task of Customized Human Object Interaction Image Generation(CHOI), which simultaneously requires identity preservation for target human object and the interaction semantic control between them. Two primary challenges exist for CHOI:(1)simultaneous identity preservation and interaction control demands require the model to decompose the human object into self-contained identity features and pose-oriented interaction features, while the current HOI image datasets fail to provide ideal samples for such feature-decomposed learning.(2)inappropriate spatial configuration between human and object may lead to the lack of desired interaction semantics. To tackle it, we first process a large-scale dataset, where each sample encompasses the same pair of human object involving different interactive poses. Then we design a two-stage model Interact-Custom, which firstly explicitly models the spatial configuration by generating a foreground mask depicting the interaction behavior, then under the guidance of this mask, we generate the target human object interacting while preserving their identities features. Furthermore, if the background image and the union location of where the target human object should appear are provided by users, Interact-Custom also provides the optional functionality to specify them, offering high content controllability. Extensive experiments on our tailored metrics for CHOI task demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 27, 2025

SWE-INTERACT: Reimagining SWE Benchmarks as User-Driven Long-Horizon Coding Sessions

We introduce SWE-Interact, a new testbed for evaluating coding agents on multi-turn, interactive, user-driven software engineering tasks. Existing frontier SWE benchmarks typically provide complete requirements upfront and evaluate agents on autonomous implementation. In contrast, SWE-Interact places agents in a realistic developer workflow: a carefully designed user simulator starts with vague or incomplete instructions, progressively reveals requirements, inspects the agent's workspace, and provides targeted feedback, revisions, and new constraints until the full task goal has been handed off. Grounded in large-scale studies of real coding-agent interactions, this setup tests whether agents can discover user intent, adapt to evolving requirements, and build on their own prior work. Across a suite of frontier and open-weight models, we find that strong performance on single-turn SWE tasks does not reliably transfer to multi-turn, user-driven workflows: the best-performing models solve roughly 50% of single-turn baseline tasks but only 25% of the corresponding SWE-Interact tasks. The strongest models in our evaluation, including Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5, start strong even in the face of vague initial instructions, persevere until all the requirements are surfaced by the user, integrate them better and write clean code. However, they still suffer from over-agentic coding, forgetting requirements and technical mistakes. Weaker models start poorly under ambiguity, give up early, forget or ignore instructions and rework their code more. Overall, SWE-Interact measures an orthogonal, real-world capability axis for frontier model development: interactive goal discovery and iterative refinement with a user in the loop.

ScaleAI Scale AI
·
Jun 28 2

Dual-Modality Multi-Stage Adversarial Safety Training: Robustifying Multimodal Web Agents Against Cross-Modal Attacks

Multimodal web agents that process both screenshots and accessibility trees are increasingly deployed to interact with web interfaces, yet their dual-stream architecture opens an underexplored attack surface: an adversary who injects content into the webpage DOM simultaneously corrupts both observation channels with a consistent deceptive narrative. Our vulnerability analysis on MiniWob++ reveals that attacks including a visual component far outperform text-only injections, exposing critical gaps in text-centric VLM safety training. Motivated by this finding, we propose Dual-Modality Multi-Stage Adversarial Safety Training (DMAST), a framework that formalizes the agent-attacker interaction as a two-player zero-sum Markov game and co-trains both players through a three-stage pipeline: (1) imitation learning from a strong teacher model, (2) oracle-guided supervised fine-tuning that uses a novel zero-acknowledgment strategy to instill task-focused reasoning under adversarial noise, and (3) adversarial reinforcement learning via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) self-play. On out-of-distribution tasks, DMAST substantially mitigates adversarial risks while simultaneously doubling task completion efficiency. Our approach significantly outperforms established training-based and prompt-based defenses, demonstrating genuine co-evolutionary progress and robust generalization to complex, unseen environments.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 3

Advances and Challenges in Conversational Recommender Systems: A Survey

Recommender systems exploit interaction history to estimate user preference, having been heavily used in a wide range of industry applications. However, static recommendation models are difficult to answer two important questions well due to inherent shortcomings: (a) What exactly does a user like? (b) Why does a user like an item? The shortcomings are due to the way that static models learn user preference, i.e., without explicit instructions and active feedback from users. The recent rise of conversational recommender systems (CRSs) changes this situation fundamentally. In a CRS, users and the system can dynamically communicate through natural language interactions, which provide unprecedented opportunities to explicitly obtain the exact preference of users. Considerable efforts, spread across disparate settings and applications, have been put into developing CRSs. Existing models, technologies, and evaluation methods for CRSs are far from mature. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of the techniques used in current CRSs. We summarize the key challenges of developing CRSs in five directions: (1) Question-based user preference elicitation. (2) Multi-turn conversational recommendation strategies. (3) Dialogue understanding and generation. (4) Exploitation-exploration trade-offs. (5) Evaluation and user simulation. These research directions involve multiple research fields like information retrieval (IR), natural language processing (NLP), and human-computer interaction (HCI). Based on these research directions, we discuss some future challenges and opportunities. We provide a road map for researchers from multiple communities to get started in this area. We hope this survey can help to identify and address challenges in CRSs and inspire future research.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 23, 2021

Omni Demand Understanding: A Benchmark for Contextual User-Intent Inference in Multimodal Interaction

Natural audio-visual interaction is emerging as an important interface for AI assistants, allowing users to communicate through speech and vision rather than carefully composed text prompts. However, existing benchmarks of interactive capabilities still focus primarily on response quality, leaving a more fundamental question underexplored: can a model correctly infer the user's underlying demand from complex multimodal interaction? Real-world user demands are often underspecified in speech and must be inferred from multimodal cues and dialogue history. This inference is further complicated by ambiguous or disfluent expression and noisy acoustic environments. Conversely, request-like speech may not constitute a demand to the assistant, leading to false triggers. We establish Omni Demand Understanding (ODU) as a distinct multimodal contextual inference problem: given an interaction stream, a model must detect whether a user demand is present and infer intent from multimodal and conversational context. ODU evaluates this capability along five dimensions, covering both single-turn and multi-turn interactions. We construct ODU-Bench using a challenge-driven taxonomy, taxonomy-guided agentic video generation, and human-recorded interactions, followed by media-grounded annotation and human verification. We evaluate 14 native MLLMs. Even the strongest, Gemini 3.1 Pro, recovers only 44.7% of key information that must be inferred from visual, acoustic, or conversational context. Moreover, 11 of the 14 models exhibit false-trigger rates above 50% on non-demand scenarios. These results reveal a systematic capability gap in current MLLMs' ability to infer contextual user demands. We hope ODU can establish the evaluation of a previously underexplored yet essential capability in multimodal interaction: correctly understanding user demands before generating an appropriate response.

  • 18 authors
·
Sep 17

DeskCraft: Benchmarking Desktop Agents on Professional Workflows and Human-in-the-Loop Collaboration

Real-world professional desktop workflows in specialized creative and engineering software unfold over long horizons and often require human-in-the-loop coordination, where agents proactively seek necessary information and users provide additional instructions, clarifications, feedback, or corrections as the task progresses. Yet existing desktop GUI benchmarks mostly reduce this setting to short, simplified tasks with all user instructions provided upfront. To address this issue, we introduce DeskCraft, a desktop GUI benchmark targeting long horizon creative and engineering workflows and proactive human-agent collaboration. DeskCraft organizes tasks into a multilevel difficulty taxonomy, with long horizon tasks requiring over 50 execution steps, and covers professional creative software across design, video, audio, and 3D creation. Furthermore, DeskCraft formalizes human-agent collaboration into an interaction protocol covering mid-turn and post-turn exchanges. Mid-turn interaction captures both agent-initiated clarification under uncertainty and user-initiated interruption during execution, while post-turn interaction accommodates user-driven feedback after the agent signals completion, together spanning the full space of realistic collaboration patterns. We evaluate 18 proprietary and open source agents on 538 tasks and find that GPT-5.4 reaches 31.6% on standard tasks and 27.6% on interactive tasks. Further analyses reveal persistent failures in long horizon workflow delivery and proactive clarification. We will open-source all evaluation codes, tasks, and data at https://github.com/mrwwk/DeskCraft.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 1

LUMOS: A Semantic Operating-System Layer for Accessibility-Grounded AI Agents

Current operating systems expose interfaces optimized for human users but not for AI agents. Humans benefit from pixels, icons, windows, visual grouping, mouse movement, and keyboard shortcuts; AI agents instead need compact semantic state, grounded actions, and reliable feedback. As a result, many computer-use agents are forced to interpret screenshots, OCR output, and visual crops, introducing high token costs, visual ambiguity, latency, and coordinate uncertainty. This paper introduces LUMOS (Language Model Unified Machine-Readable Operating-System Semantics), a semantic interaction layer between AI agents and operating systems. LUMOS converts native accessibility metadata and browser UI structures into machine readable semantic blueprints with stable identifiers, roles, names, values, bounds, and action affordances. It also supports live semantic pointer grounding by querying the UI element under or near the cursor through operating-system automation APIs. An LLM then acts through an accessibility grounded observe act loop using constrained visible-UI primitives rather than application-specific scripts. LUMOS does not claim to replace visual agents; instead, it reduces dependence on screenshots when operating systems already provide semantic structure. These results suggest a path toward AI-native operating systems and machine-readable interaction layers.

Creating General User Models from Computer Use

Human-computer interaction has long imagined technology that understands us-from our preferences and habits, to the timing and purpose of our everyday actions. Yet current user models remain fragmented, narrowly tailored to specific apps, and incapable of the flexible reasoning required to fulfill these visions. This paper presents an architecture for a general user model (GUM) that learns about you by observing any interaction you have with your computer. The GUM takes as input any unstructured observation of a user (e.g., device screenshots) and constructs confidence-weighted propositions that capture that user knowledge and preferences. GUMs can infer that a user is preparing for a wedding they're attending from messages with a friend. Or recognize that a user is struggling with a collaborator's feedback on a draft by observing multiple stalled edits and a switch to reading related work. GUMs introduce an architecture that infers new propositions about a user from multimodal observations, retrieves related propositions for context, and continuously revises existing propositions. To illustrate the breadth of applications that GUMs enable, we demonstrate how they augment chat-based assistants with context, manage OS notifications to selectively surface important information, and enable interactive agents that adapt to preferences across apps. We also instantiate proactive assistants (GUMBOs) that discover and execute useful suggestions on a user's behalf using their GUM. In our evaluations, we find that GUMs make calibrated and accurate inferences about users, and that assistants built on GUMs proactively identify and perform actions that users wouldn't think to request explicitly. Altogether, GUMs introduce methods that leverage multimodal models to understand unstructured context, enabling long-standing visions of HCI and entirely new interactive systems that anticipate user needs.

  • 7 authors
·
May 16, 2025 2

Constructing Challenging Browser-Use Tasks by Controlled Environment Interventions

As browser-use agents improve, benchmarks keep pace by collecting new tasks, websites, and applications, often making tasks longer or more novel. This makes difficulty expensive to refresh and difficult to control: when many aspects change at once, it is unclear what actually makes a task challenging. We instead construct challenging instances from tasks agents already solve, turning difficulty into a programmable property of the environment. BreakingWeb pairs every base task with an intervention condition that preserves the user instruction, latent target, and backend success criterion while changing the environment at different web stack layers. Each intervention is deterministic, detectable, and recoverable, and is annotated with the cognitive primitive it primarily loads. The benchmark contains 519 clean/intervention task pairs across seven self-hosted websites and 29 intervention families, all graded against outcomes. We evaluate six strong browser-use agents, three GUI-only agents that see only screenshots, and humans. The construction is effective: interventions cut agent pass rate by 22.9% on average and overturn nearly half of the tasks each agent solves cleanly, whereas humans lose 10.0% on a first attempt and 5.7% after one familiarisation attempt. The dominant failure is belief failure: 75% of the six agents' failures end with a declared success although the required change never happened. Our code, data and environment are publicly available at www.breakingweb.app.

  • 11 authors
·
Sep 19

The BrowserGym Ecosystem for Web Agent Research

The BrowserGym ecosystem addresses the growing need for efficient evaluation and benchmarking of web agents, particularly those leveraging automation and Large Language Models (LLMs) for web interaction tasks. Many existing benchmarks suffer from fragmentation and inconsistent evaluation methodologies, making it challenging to achieve reliable comparisons and reproducible results. BrowserGym aims to solve this by providing a unified, gym-like environment with well-defined observation and action spaces, facilitating standardized evaluation across diverse benchmarks. Combined with AgentLab, a complementary framework that aids in agent creation, testing, and analysis, BrowserGym offers flexibility for integrating new benchmarks while ensuring consistent evaluation and comprehensive experiment management. This standardized approach seeks to reduce the time and complexity of developing web agents, supporting more reliable comparisons and facilitating in-depth analysis of agent behaviors, and could result in more adaptable, capable agents, ultimately accelerating innovation in LLM-driven automation. As a supporting evidence, we conduct the first large-scale, multi-benchmark web agent experiment and compare the performance of 6 state-of-the-art LLMs across all benchmarks currently available in BrowserGym. Among other findings, our results highlight a large discrepancy between OpenAI and Anthropic's latests models, with Claude-3.5-Sonnet leading the way on almost all benchmarks, except on vision-related tasks where GPT-4o is superior. Despite these advancements, our results emphasize that building robust and efficient web agents remains a significant challenge, due to the inherent complexity of real-world web environments and the limitations of current models.

  • 20 authors
·
Dec 6, 2024 2

Follow-Your-Click: Open-domain Regional Image Animation via Short Prompts

Despite recent advances in image-to-video generation, better controllability and local animation are less explored. Most existing image-to-video methods are not locally aware and tend to move the entire scene. However, human artists may need to control the movement of different objects or regions. Additionally, current I2V methods require users not only to describe the target motion but also to provide redundant detailed descriptions of frame contents. These two issues hinder the practical utilization of current I2V tools. In this paper, we propose a practical framework, named Follow-Your-Click, to achieve image animation with a simple user click (for specifying what to move) and a short motion prompt (for specifying how to move). Technically, we propose the first-frame masking strategy, which significantly improves the video generation quality, and a motion-augmented module equipped with a short motion prompt dataset to improve the short prompt following abilities of our model. To further control the motion speed, we propose flow-based motion magnitude control to control the speed of target movement more precisely. Our framework has simpler yet precise user control and better generation performance than previous methods. Extensive experiments compared with 7 baselines, including both commercial tools and research methods on 8 metrics, suggest the superiority of our approach. Project Page: https://follow-your-click.github.io/

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 13, 2024 5

InteractEdit: Zero-Shot Editing of Human-Object Interactions in Images

This paper presents InteractEdit, a novel framework for zero-shot Human-Object Interaction (HOI) editing, addressing the challenging task of transforming an existing interaction in an image into a new, desired interaction while preserving the identities of the subject and object. Unlike simpler image editing scenarios such as attribute manipulation, object replacement or style transfer, HOI editing involves complex spatial, contextual, and relational dependencies inherent in humans-objects interactions. Existing methods often overfit to the source image structure, limiting their ability to adapt to the substantial structural modifications demanded by new interactions. To address this, InteractEdit decomposes each scene into subject, object, and background components, then employs Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and selective fine-tuning to preserve pretrained interaction priors while learning the visual identity of the source image. This regularization strategy effectively balances interaction edits with identity consistency. We further introduce IEBench, the most comprehensive benchmark for HOI editing, which evaluates both interaction editing and identity preservation. Our extensive experiments show that InteractEdit significantly outperforms existing methods, establishing a strong baseline for future HOI editing research and unlocking new possibilities for creative and practical applications. Code will be released upon publication.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 12, 2025

MAG: A Web-Agent Benchmark and Harness for Multimodal Action and Guide Generation

Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs) are embedded overlays widely used on web systems to guide users through operations inside a page, helping them get started with unfamiliar interfaces quickly. Completing a real task, however, rarely means clicking a few buttons on a single page: it takes a sequence of actions that unfolds across changing page states. Prior studies have also treated automated web agent actions and guide text generation as two separate problems, and most of them feed models textual page representations such as the DOM or accessibility trees rather than the rendered screens that humans actually operate on. In this work we introduce MAG, the first benchmark that unifies task execution and guide writing into a single Multimodal Action and Guide task, with two grounding schemes over screenshots: Set-of-Mark element selection and raw pixel coordinates. We further build a complete harness for this compound task, covering annotation with LLM assistance and human verification, training, evaluation in live environments, and joint metrics for actions and guides. With this harness we evaluate frontier API models and open multimodal models, and report detailed analyses. Finally, we design a GRPO training method augmented with expert trajectories, which nearly doubles the success rate of a supervised 9B agent (from 6.9% to 13.2%) and improves guide quality at the same time. Even the strongest model completes fewer than 40% of the tasks, leaving ample room for future research.

  • 6 authors
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Jul 15

Seamless and Efficient Interactions within a Mixed-Dimensional Information Space

Mediated by today's visual displays, information space allows users to discover, access and interact with a wide range of digital and physical information. The information presented in this space may be digital, physical or a blend of both, and appear across different dimensions - such as texts, images, 3D content and physical objects embedded within real-world environment. Navigating within the information space often involves interacting with mixed-dimensional entities, visually represented in both 2D and 3D. At times, interactions also involve transitioning among entities represented in different dimensions. We introduce the concept of mixed-dimensional information space, encompassing entities represented in both 2D and 3D. Interactions within the mixed-dimensional information space should be seamless and efficient: users should be able to focus on their primary tasks without being distracted by interactions with or transitions between entities. While incorporating 3D representations into the mixed-dimensional information space offers intuitive and immersive ways to interact with complex information, it is important to address potential seams and inefficiencies that arise while interacting with both 2D and 3D entities. This dissertation introduces new interactive techniques and systems to realize seamless and efficient interactions within the mixed-dimensional information space. This dissertation introduces three interactive systems: MemoVis which aims to use emergent generative AI to help users create reference images for 3D design feedback; PaperToPlace which demonstrates how paper-based instruction documents can be transformed and spatialized into a context-aware MR experience; and VRContour which explores how contour delineation workflow can be brought into VR.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 4, 2025

EconSkills: Studying Skill Transfer and Retrieval for Web Agents on Live Economic Data

Web agents often revisit the same sites, yet most evaluations discard the procedures learned in earlier successful interactions. We introduce EconSkills, a skill library and evaluation framework that distills verified EconWebArena trajectories into parameterized standard operating procedures for retrieving live economic data. Each skill records its scope, navigation procedure, site-specific guidance, verification checks, and recovery steps while replacing source-instance values with placeholders. EconSkills separates two questions: whether a known relevant procedure transfers to a held-out task, and whether an agent can retain that benefit when selecting from a library. In controlled transfer, matched skills improve success over no-skill prompting and require fewer steps on paired successes, while abstraction is substantially more effective than replaying raw trajectories. At library scale, retrieval is competitive with the no-skill baseline overall and performs best on directly covered tasks; coverage-stratified outcomes show that approximate matches on uncovered tasks offset these gains. Browser trajectories further identify when procedural guidance shortens portal-specific navigation and when semantic verification remains necessary. These results establish that reusable economic web procedures can transfer across task instances and provide a concrete design target for coverage-aware selection and context delivery.

  • 2 authors
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Sep 16

RecoWorld: Building Simulated Environments for Agentic Recommender Systems

We present RecoWorld, a blueprint for building simulated environments tailored to agentic recommender systems. Such environments give agents a proper training space where they can learn from errors without impacting real users. RecoWorld distinguishes itself with a dual-view architecture: a simulated user and an agentic recommender engage in multi-turn interactions aimed at maximizing user retention. The user simulator reviews recommended items, updates its mindset, and when sensing potential user disengagement, generates reflective instructions. The agentic recommender adapts its recommendations by incorporating these user instructions and reasoning traces, creating a dynamic feedback loop that actively engages users. This process leverages the exceptional reasoning capabilities of modern LLMs. We explore diverse content representations within the simulator, including text-based, multimodal, and semantic ID modeling, and discuss how multi-turn RL enables the recommender to refine its strategies through iterative interactions. RecoWorld also supports multi-agent simulations, allowing creators to simulate the responses of targeted user populations. It marks an important first step toward recommender systems where users and agents collaboratively shape personalized information streams. We envision new interaction paradigms where "user instructs, recommender responds," jointly optimizing user retention and engagement.

  • 15 authors
·
Sep 12, 2025 2

Memorize, Factorize, or be Naïve: Learning Optimal Feature Interaction Methods for CTR Prediction

Click-through rate prediction is one of the core tasks in commercial recommender systems. It aims to predict the probability of a user clicking a particular item given user and item features. As feature interactions bring in non-linearity, they are widely adopted to improve the performance of CTR prediction models. Therefore, effectively modelling feature interactions has attracted much attention in both the research and industry field. The current approaches can generally be categorized into three classes: (1) na\"ive methods, which do not model feature interactions and only use original features; (2) memorized methods, which memorize feature interactions by explicitly viewing them as new features and assigning trainable embeddings; (3) factorized methods, which learn latent vectors for original features and implicitly model feature interactions through factorization functions. Studies have shown that modelling feature interactions by one of these methods alone are suboptimal due to the unique characteristics of different feature interactions. To address this issue, we first propose a general framework called OptInter which finds the most suitable modelling method for each feature interaction. Different state-of-the-art deep CTR models can be viewed as instances of OptInter. To realize the functionality of OptInter, we also introduce a learning algorithm that automatically searches for the optimal modelling method. We conduct extensive experiments on four large datasets. Our experiments show that OptInter improves the best performed state-of-the-art baseline deep CTR models by up to 2.21%. Compared to the memorized method, which also outperforms baselines, we reduce up to 91% parameters. In addition, we conduct several ablation studies to investigate the influence of different components of OptInter. Finally, we provide interpretable discussions on the results of OptInter.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 2, 2021

You Only Look at Screens: Multimodal Chain-of-Action Agents

Autonomous user interface (UI) agents aim to facilitate task automation by interacting with the user interface without manual intervention. Recent studies have investigated eliciting the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for effective engagement in diverse environments. To align with the input-output requirement of LLMs, existing approaches are developed under a sandbox setting where they rely on external tools and application-specific APIs to parse the environment into textual elements and interpret the predicted actions. Consequently, those approaches often grapple with inference inefficiency and error propagation risks. To mitigate the challenges, we introduce Auto-UI, a multimodal solution that directly interacts with the interface, bypassing the need for environment parsing or reliance on application-dependent APIs. Moreover, we propose a chain-of-action technique -- leveraging a series of intermediate previous action histories and future action plans -- to help the agent decide what action to execute. We evaluate our approach on a new device-control benchmark AITW with 30K unique instructions, spanning multi-step tasks such as application operation, web searching, and web shopping. Experimental results show that Auto-UI achieves state-of-the-art performance with an action type prediction accuracy of 90% and an overall action success rate of 74%. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/cooelf/Auto-UI.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 20, 2023

MoReact: Generating Reactive Motion from Textual Descriptions

Modeling and generating human reactions poses a significant challenge with broad applications for computer vision and human-computer interaction. Existing methods either treat multiple individuals as a single entity, directly generating interactions, or rely solely on one person's motion to generate the other's reaction, failing to integrate the rich semantic information that underpins human interactions. Yet, these methods often fall short in adaptive responsiveness, i.e., the ability to accurately respond to diverse and dynamic interaction scenarios. Recognizing this gap, our work introduces an approach tailored to address the limitations of existing models by focusing on text-driven human reaction generation. Our model specifically generates realistic motion sequences for individuals that responding to the other's actions based on a descriptive text of the interaction scenario. The goal is to produce motion sequences that not only complement the opponent's movements but also semantically fit the described interactions. To achieve this, we present MoReact, a diffusion-based method designed to disentangle the generation of global trajectories and local motions sequentially. This approach stems from the observation that generating global trajectories first is crucial for guiding local motion, ensuring better alignment with given action and text. Furthermore, we introduce a novel interaction loss to enhance the realism of generated close interactions. Our experiments, utilizing data adapted from a two-person motion dataset, demonstrate the efficacy of our approach for this novel task, which is capable of producing realistic, diverse, and controllable reactions that not only closely match the movements of the counterpart but also adhere to the textual guidance. Please find our webpage at https://xiyan-xu.github.io/MoReactWebPage.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 28, 2025

INFNet: A Task-aware Information Flow Network for Large-Scale Recommendation Systems

Feature interaction has long been a cornerstone of ranking models in large-scale recommender systems due to its proven effectiveness in capturing complex dependencies among features. However, existing feature interaction strategies face two critical challenges in industrial applications: (1) The vast number of categorical and sequential features makes exhaustive interaction computationally prohibitive, often resulting in optimization difficulties. (2) Real-world recommender systems typically involve multiple prediction objectives, yet most current approaches apply feature interaction modules prior to the multi-task learning layers. This late-fusion design overlooks task-specific feature dependencies and inherently limits the capacity of multi-task modeling. To address these limitations, we propose the Information Flow Network (INFNet), a task-aware architecture designed for large-scale recommendation scenarios. INFNet distinguishes features into three token types, categorical tokens, sequence tokens, and task tokens, and introduces a novel dual-flow design comprising heterogeneous and homogeneous alternating information blocks. For heterogeneous information flow, we employ a cross-attention mechanism with proxy that facilitates efficient cross-modal token interaction with balanced computational cost. For homogeneous flow, we design type-specific Proxy Gated Units (PGUs) to enable fine-grained intra-type feature processing. Extensive experiments on multiple offline benchmarks confirm that INFNet achieves state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, INFNet has been successfully deployed in a commercial online advertising system, yielding significant gains of +1.587% in Revenue (REV) and +1.155% in Click-Through Rate (CTR).

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 15, 2025

The Impact of Element Ordering on LM Agent Performance

There has been a surge of interest in language model agents that can navigate virtual environments such as the web or desktop. To navigate such environments, agents benefit from information on the various elements (e.g., buttons, text, or images) present. It remains unclear which element attributes have the greatest impact on agent performance, especially in environments that only provide a graphical representation (i.e., pixels). Here we find that the ordering in which elements are presented to the language model is surprisingly impactful--randomizing element ordering in a webpage degrades agent performance comparably to removing all visible text from an agent's state representation. While a webpage provides a hierarchical ordering of elements, there is no such ordering when parsing elements directly from pixels. Moreover, as tasks become more challenging and models more sophisticated, our experiments suggest that the impact of ordering increases. Finding an effective ordering is non-trivial. We investigate the impact of various element ordering methods in web and desktop environments. We find that dimensionality reduction provides a viable ordering for pixel-only environments. We train a UI element detection model to derive elements from pixels and apply our findings to an agent benchmark--OmniACT--where we only have access to pixels. Our method completes more than two times as many tasks on average relative to the previous state-of-the-art.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 18, 2024

AgentTell: Behavioural Side-Channel Leakage in Browser-Use Agents

Browser-use agents often carry information in their context as they move between websites. While it may be necessary for task completion, it also creates a privacy risk, especially when the information contains a private fact regarding the user. For example, an agent may learn a user's affiliation after reading a membership record. If it later selects a registration option specific to that affiliation on another website instead of a general option, the information gets leaked. In this work, we define and study behavioural side-channel leakage in browser-use agents, where an agent's actions inadvertently reveal private information (secret) retained from a prior website, despite an explicit instruction not to disclose it. We introduce AgentTell, a benchmark of 20 scenarios and 100 tasks in which an agent acquires a secret on one website and then completes a task on another website that offers secret-specific actions alongside a general action that reveals nothing. Our evaluation across 9,760 sessions on six backbones shows that agents carrying a secret reveal it through their actions in 61.1% of sessions. Even when agents explicitly state in memory that the secret must not be shared, they still reveal it in 56.7% of those sessions. Moreover, in 34.5% of leaking sessions, their final responses falsely assure users that the secret was not disclosed. These findings show that agents often fail to recognize side-channel leakage as a privacy risk.

ShowUI-Aloha: Human-Taught GUI Agent

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are central to human-computer interaction, yet automating complex GUI tasks remains a major challenge for autonomous agents, largely due to a lack of scalable, high-quality training data. While recordings of human demonstrations offer a rich data source, they are typically long, unstructured, and lack annotations, making them difficult for agents to learn from.To address this, we introduce ShowUI-Aloha, a comprehensive pipeline that transforms unstructured, in-the-wild human screen recordings from desktop environments into structured, actionable tasks. Our framework includes four key components: A recorder that captures screen video along with precise user interactions like mouse clicks, keystrokes, and scrolls. A learner that semantically interprets these raw interactions and the surrounding visual context, translating them into descriptive natural language captions. A planner that reads the parsed demonstrations, maintains task states, and dynamically formulates the next high-level action plan based on contextual reasoning. An executor that faithfully carries out these action plans at the OS level, performing precise clicks, drags, text inputs, and window operations with safety checks and real-time feedback. Together, these components provide a scalable solution for collecting and parsing real-world human data, demonstrating a viable path toward building general-purpose GUI agents that can learn effectively from simply observing humans.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 11 2

Large Language Model-Brained GUI Agents: A Survey

GUIs have long been central to human-computer interaction, providing an intuitive and visually-driven way to access and interact with digital systems. The advent of LLMs, particularly multimodal models, has ushered in a new era of GUI automation. They have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in natural language understanding, code generation, and visual processing. This has paved the way for a new generation of LLM-brained GUI agents capable of interpreting complex GUI elements and autonomously executing actions based on natural language instructions. These agents represent a paradigm shift, enabling users to perform intricate, multi-step tasks through simple conversational commands. Their applications span across web navigation, mobile app interactions, and desktop automation, offering a transformative user experience that revolutionizes how individuals interact with software. This emerging field is rapidly advancing, with significant progress in both research and industry. To provide a structured understanding of this trend, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of LLM-brained GUI agents, exploring their historical evolution, core components, and advanced techniques. We address research questions such as existing GUI agent frameworks, the collection and utilization of data for training specialized GUI agents, the development of large action models tailored for GUI tasks, and the evaluation metrics and benchmarks necessary to assess their effectiveness. Additionally, we examine emerging applications powered by these agents. Through a detailed analysis, this survey identifies key research gaps and outlines a roadmap for future advancements in the field. By consolidating foundational knowledge and state-of-the-art developments, this work aims to guide both researchers and practitioners in overcoming challenges and unlocking the full potential of LLM-brained GUI agents.

  • 12 authors
·
Nov 27, 2024 3