# WorldGUI: An Interactive Benchmark for Desktop GUI Automation from Any Starting Point

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.08047 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08047/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in GUI and mobile agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 27 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Feb 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [GUI and mobile agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/gui-and-mobile-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13854/) (2023)
- [WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01206/) (2022)
- [CRITIC: Large Language Models Can Self-Correct with Tool-Interactive Critiquing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11738/) (2023)
- [CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08914/) (2023)
- [SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10935/) (2024)
- [GPT-4V(ision) is a Generalist Web Agent, if Grounded](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01614/) (2024)
- [WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13919/) (2024)
- [AppAgent: Multimodal Agents as Smartphone Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13771/) (2023)
- [Navigating the Digital World as Humans Do: Universal Visual Grounding for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05243/) (2024)
- [Mobile-Agent: Autonomous Multi-Modal Mobile Device Agent with Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16158/) (2024)
- [Aguvis: Unified Pure Vision Agents for Autonomous GUI Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04454/) (2024)
- [ShowUI: One Vision-Language-Action Model for GUI Visual Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17465/) (2024)
- [Windows Agent Arena: Evaluating Multi-Modal OS Agents at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08264/) (2024)
- [Agent S: An Open Agentic Framework that Uses Computers Like a Human](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08164/) (2024)
- [AutoDroid: LLM-powered Task Automation in Android](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15272/) (2023)
- [Ferret-UI: Grounded Mobile UI Understanding with Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05719/) (2024)
- [Mobile-Agent-E: Self-Evolving Mobile Assistant for Complex Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11733/) (2025)
- [AutoWebGLM: A Large Language Model-based Web Navigating Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03648/) (2024)
- [AgentTrek: Agent Trajectory Synthesis via Guiding Replay with Web Tutorials](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09605/) (2024)
- [The Dawn of GUI Agent: A Preliminary Case Study with Claude 3.5 Computer Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10323/) (2024)
- [AgentStudio: A Toolkit for Building General Virtual Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17918/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [A Survey on (M)LLM-Based GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13865/) (2025)
- [ZeroGUI: Automating Online GUI Learning at Zero Human Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23762/) (2025)
- [OSWorld 2.0: Benchmarking Computer Use Agents on Long-Horizon Real-World Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29537/) (2026)
- [A Survey on Agentic Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10991/) (2025)
- [OS-Symphony: A Holistic Framework for Robust and Generalist Computer-Using Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07779/) (2026)
- [On the Reliability of Computer Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17849/) (2026)
- [WindowsWorld: A Process-Centric Benchmark of Autonomous GUI Agents in Professional Cross-Application Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27776/) (2026)
- [ProactiveMobile: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Boosting Proactive Intelligence on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21858/) (2026)
- [DeskCraft: Benchmarking Desktop Agents on Professional Workflows and Human-in-the-Loop Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03103/) (2026)
- [GUIDE: A Benchmark for Understanding and Assisting Users in Open-Ended GUI Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25864/) (2026)
- [Pix2Fact: When Vision Is Not Enough -- Benchmarking Fine-Grained VQA with Web Verification on High-Resolution Real-World Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00593/) (2026)
- [GUI-Perturbed: Domain Randomization Reveals Systematic Brittleness in GUI Grounding Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14262/) (2026)
- [Recovering Policy-Induced Errors: Benchmarking and Trajectory Synthesis for Robust GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29447/) (2026)
- [InfraMind: A Novel Exploration-based GUI Agentic Framework for Mission-critical Industrial Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13704/) (2025)
- [Learning from Online Videos at Inference Time for Computer-Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04137/) (2025)
- [PAGER: Bridging the Semantic-Execution Gap in Point-Precise Geometric GUI Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15963/) (2026)
- [CutVerse: A Compositional GUI Agents Benchmark for Media Post-Production Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19484/) (2026)
- [Learn from Weaknesses: Automated Domain Specialization for Small Computer-Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28775/) (2026)
- [Securing Computer-Use Agents: A Unified Architecture-Lifecycle Framework for Deployment-Grounded Reliability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07110/) (2026)
- [A Decade in a Day: Synthesizing Agent-Native Interfaces from Human-Oriented Software Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15765/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent progress in GUI agents has substantially improved visual grounding, yet robust planning remains challenging, particularly when the environment deviates from a canonical initial state. In real applications, users often invoke assistance mid-workflow, where software may be partially configured, steps may have been executed in different orders, or the interface may differ from its default setup. Such task-state variability is pervasive but insufficiently evaluated in existing GUI benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce WorldGUI, a benchmark covering ten widely used desktop and web applications with tasks instantiated under diverse, systematically constructed initial states. These variations capture realistic human-computer interaction settings and enable diagnostic evaluation of an agent's ability to recover, adapt plans, and handle non-default contexts. We further present WorldGUI-Agent, a simple and model-agnostic framework that organizes planning and execution around three critique stages, improving reliability in dynamic environments. Experiments demonstrate that state-of-the-art GUI agents exhibit substantial performance degradation under non-default initial conditions, revealing limited robustness and fragile planning behaviors. Our benchmark and framework provide a foundation for developing more adaptable and reliable GUI agents. The code and data are available at https://github.com/showlab/WorldGUI.