Pith

open record

sign in

arxiv: 2409.08264 · v2 · pith:5NIZO4ZJ · submitted 2024-09-12 · cs.AI

Windows Agent Arena: Evaluating Multi-Modal OS Agents at Scale

Reviewed by Pith T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 kernel pith:5NIZO4ZJrecord.jsonopen to challenge →

classification cs.AI
keywords agentwindowsarenabenchmarkperformancetasksagentshuman
0
0 comments X
read the original abstract

Large language models (LLMs) show remarkable potential to act as computer agents, enhancing human productivity and software accessibility in multi-modal tasks that require planning and reasoning. However, measuring agent performance in realistic environments remains a challenge since: (i) most benchmarks are limited to specific modalities or domains (e.g. text-only, web navigation, Q&A, coding) and (ii) full benchmark evaluations are slow (on order of magnitude of days) given the multi-step sequential nature of tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce the Windows Agent Arena: a reproducible, general environment focusing exclusively on the Windows operating system (OS) where agents can operate freely within a real Windows OS and use the same wide range of applications, tools, and web browsers available to human users when solving tasks. We adapt the OSWorld framework (Xie et al., 2024) to create 150+ diverse Windows tasks across representative domains that require agent abilities in planning, screen understanding, and tool usage. Our benchmark is scalable and can be seamlessly parallelized in Azure for a full benchmark evaluation in as little as 20 minutes. To demonstrate Windows Agent Arena's capabilities, we also introduce a new multi-modal agent, Navi. Our agent achieves a success rate of 19.5% in the Windows domain, compared to 74.5% performance of an unassisted human. Navi also demonstrates strong performance on another popular web-based benchmark, Mind2Web. We offer extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of Navi's performance, and provide insights into the opportunities for future research in agent development and data generation using Windows Agent Arena. Webpage: https://microsoft.github.io/WindowsAgentArena Code: https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsAgentArena

This paper has not been read by Pith yet.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 33 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. WildClawBench: A Benchmark for Real-World, Long-Horizon Agent Evaluation

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 8.0

    A new native-runtime benchmark reveals that current frontier AI agents succeed on at most 62 percent of realistic long-horizon CLI tasks.

  2. SEATauBench: Adapting Tool-Agent-User Evaluation Into Low-Resource Southeast Asian Languages

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    SEATauBench is the first agent benchmark for SEA languages, finding that performance holds for language-only changes but degrades sharply with full domain localization.

  3. PreAct: Computer-Using Agents that Get Faster on Repeated Tasks

    cs.AI 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    PreAct compiles successful agent executions into verifiable state-machine programs for 8.5-13x faster replay on repeated tasks, with an independent evaluator check before storing each program.

  4. ProCUA-SFT Technical Report

    cs.LG 2026-06 conditional novelty 7.0

    ProCUA-SFT is a 3.1M-sample SFT dataset from 93K verified synthetic trajectories that lifts UI-TARS 7B OSWorld score from 26.3% to 45%.

  5. AndroidDaily: A Verifiable Benchmark for Mobile GUI Agents on Real-World Closed-Source Applications

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    AndroidDaily supplies 350 verifiable tasks on 94 closed-source Android apps evaluated by GRADE (87.37% human agreement), with the strongest model achieving 62% success.

  6. ScaleWoB: Guiding GUI Agents with Coding Agents via Large-Scale Environmental Synthesis

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    ScaleWoB generates 100+ synthetic interactive GUI environments and 1000+ verifiable tasks as web pages, releasing a 120-task mobile benchmark where state-of-the-art agents achieve 27.92% success (17.82% on long-horizo...

  7. PANDO: Efficient Multimodal AI Agents via Online Skill Distillation

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    PANDO introduces an online skill-distillation method with a structured library, reflection, demotion, routing, compression, and cache-aware prompting that reaches 58.3% success on 910 VisualWebArena tasks using 58-61%...

  8. WinDeskGround: A Benchmark for Robust GUI Grounding in Complex Multi-Window Desktop Environments

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    WinDeskGround is a parametrically generated benchmark of 1,356 instruction-target pairs that reveals accuracy declines in state-of-the-art MLLMs under partial occlusion in multi-window GUI settings.

  9. Covering Human Action Space for Computer Use: Data Synthesis and Benchmark

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Presents CUActSpot benchmark and renderer-LLM data synthesis that lets a 4B model outperform larger open-source models on complex computer interactions.

  10. From Task to Tutorial: An Automated GUI Framework for Excel Tutorial Document and Video Creation

    cs.SE 2025-09 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    An AI framework automates Excel tutorial and video creation from task descriptions via an Execution Agent, achieving 8.5% higher task success and 1/20th the authoring time of experts.

  11. AndroidWorld: A Dynamic Benchmarking Environment for Autonomous Agents

    cs.AI 2024-05 accept novelty 7.0

    AndroidWorld is a dynamic, reproducible Android benchmark that generates unlimited natural-language tasks for autonomous agents and shows current agents succeed on only 30.6 percent of them.

  12. PhoneBuddy: Training Open Models for Agentic Phone Use

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    PhoneBuddy combines real-app and mock-app RL after shared SFT, raising real-phone task success from 36.67% to 45.33% and AndroidWorld from 60.3% to 83.2%.

  13. What to Format and How: A Benchmark and Workflow Approach for Document Formatting

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Presents DocFormBench benchmark and DocFormFlow workflow for content-aware LLM document formatting, claiming higher accuracy and lower token use via decoupled localization and modification.

  14. unix-ctf: Procedural Environments for Unix-Competence Reinforcement Learning

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    unix-ctf procedurally generates 656 Unix CTF tasks across 155 techniques; fine-tuning Qwen3-8B on them raises solve rate from 11.6% to 43.6% on a 15-skill holdout and yields +33 pp in Forensics on InterCode-CTF.

  15. Learn from Weaknesses: Automated Domain Specialization for Small Computer-Use Agents

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    LearnWeak specializes small CUAs via weakness detection by a reference agent, targeted task synthesis, and error-aware training, delivering 11+ point gains on OSWorld.

  16. OpenComputer: Verifiable Software Worlds for Computer-Use Agents

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    OpenComputer introduces a verifier-grounded framework with state verifiers, self-evolving layers, task synthesis, and auditable evaluation for 33 desktop apps and 1000 tasks to support computer-use AI agents.

  17. ToolCUA: Towards Optimal GUI-Tool Path Orchestration for Computer Use Agents

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    ToolCUA introduces a trajectory scaling pipeline and staged RL to optimize GUI-tool switching, reaching 46.85% accuracy on OSWorld-MCP for a 66% relative gain over baseline.

  18. VLAA-GUI: Knowing When to Stop, Recover, and Search, A Modular Framework for GUI Automation

    cs.CL 2026-04 conditional novelty 6.0

    VLAA-GUI adds mandatory visual verifiers, multi-tier loop breakers, and on-demand search to GUI agents, reaching 77.5% on OSWorld and 61.0% on WindowsAgentArena with some models exceeding human performance.

  19. Memory in the Age of AI Agents

    cs.CL 2025-12 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    The paper maps agent memory research via three forms (token-level, parametric, latent), three functions (factual, experiential, working), and dynamics of formation/evolution/retrieval, plus benchmarks and future directions.

  20. When Should Users Check? Modeling Confirmation Frequency inMulti-Step Agentic AI Tasks

    cs.HC 2025-10 conditional novelty 6.0

    A decision-theoretic model based on the observed Confirmation-Diagnosis-Correction-Redo user pattern places intermediate confirmations in AI agent tasks, yielding 81% user preference and 13.54% faster completion versu...

  21. InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency

    cs.CV 2025-08 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    InternVL3.5 advances open-source multimodal models with Cascade RL for +16% reasoning gains and ViR for 4x inference speedup, with the 241B model reaching SOTA among open-source MLLMs on multimodal, reasoning, and age...

  22. VS-Bench: Evaluating VLMs for Strategic Abilities in Multi-Agent Environments

    cs.AI 2025-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    VS-Bench is a new benchmark of ten visual multi-agent environments that measures VLMs on element recognition, next-action prediction, and normalized episode return, showing strong perception but large gaps in reasonin...

  23. InfiGUI-R1: Advancing Multimodal GUI Agents from Reactive Actors to Deliberative Reasoners

    cs.AI 2025-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    InfiGUI-R1 uses Reasoning Injection via spatial distillation followed by Deliberation Enhancement via RL to evolve GUI agents from reactive actors to deliberative reasoners, reporting strong performance on grounding a...

  24. Agentic Environment Engineering for Large Language Models: A Survey of Environment Modeling, Synthesis, Evaluation, and Application

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    This survey categorizes agentic environments for LLMs by eight attributes and domains, introduces symbolic and neural synthesis paradigms with evaluation, and outlines four agent evolution pathways plus three environm...

  25. Exploring LLM Agent Designs and Interaction Modalities for Scientific Visualization

    cs.AI 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    General-purpose coding agents achieve highest success on SciVis tasks but at high cost, while domain-specific agents are efficient yet less flexible and computer-use agents struggle with long workflows.

  26. Exploring LLM Agent Designs and Interaction Modalities for Scientific Visualization

    cs.AI 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Empirical comparison of domain-specific, computer-use, and general-purpose LLM agents plus CLI/GUI modalities on SciVis tasks reveals general-purpose agents highest in success rate but costliest, domain-specific agent...

  27. Exploring LLM Agent Designs and Interaction Modalities for Scientific Visualization

    cs.AI 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    General-purpose coding agents achieve highest success on SciVis tasks but cost more compute, while domain-specific agents are efficient yet less flexible and computer-use agents falter on long workflows.

  28. GUI Agents with Reinforcement Learning: Toward Digital Inhabitants

    cs.AI 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    The paper delivers the first comprehensive overview of RL for GUI agents, organizing methods into offline, online, and hybrid strategies while analyzing trends in rewards, efficiency, and deliberation to outline a fut...

  29. A Comprehensive Survey of Agents for Computer Use: Foundations, Challenges, and Future Directions

    cs.AI 2025-01 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    A survey of 87 agents for computer use and 33 datasets that introduces a three-dimensional taxonomy across domain, interaction, and agent perspectives and identifies six research gaps.

  30. InternVideo3: Agentify Foundation Models with Multimodal Contextual Reasoning

    cs.CV 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    InternVideo3 introduces Multimodal Contextual Reasoning and M^2LA attention to enable closed-loop evidence accumulation in long-video understanding and agentic tool use, reporting strong benchmark results.

  31. The Agent Use of Agent Beings: Agent Cybernetics Is the Missing Science of Foundation Agents

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Agent Cybernetics reframes foundation agent design by adapting classical cybernetics laws into three engineering desiderata for reliable, long-running, self-improving agents.

  32. Seed1.5-VL Technical Report

    cs.CV 2025-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Seed1.5-VL is a compact multimodal model that sets new records on dozens of vision-language benchmarks and outperforms prior systems on agent-style tasks.

  33. Toward Native Multimodal Modeling: A Roadmap

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 3.0

    A roadmap that defines architectural nativity for multimodal models and categorizes them into Multi-to-Text, Multi-to-Target, and Multi-to-Multi types while outlining an industrial pipeline toward unified transformer-...