mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Next-Gen CAPTCHAs: Leveraging the Cognitive Gap for Scalable and Diverse GUI-Agent Defense

arXiv 2602.09012 ↗First posted 9 Feb 2026cs.LG cs.AI cs.CLcited by 2

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance

Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid evolution of GUI-enabled agents has rendered traditional CAPTCHAs obsolete. While previous benchmarks like OpenCaptchaWorld established a baseline for evaluating multimodal agents, recent advancements in reasoning-heavy models, such as Gemini3-Pro-High and GPT-5.2-Xhigh have effectively collapsed this security barrier, achieving pass rates as high as 90% on complex logic puzzles like "Bingo". In response, we introduce Next-Gen CAPTCHAs, a scalable defense framework designed to secure the next-generation web against the advanced agents. Unlike static datasets, our benchmark is built upon a robust data generation pipeline, allowing for large-scale and easily scalable evaluations, notably, for backend-supported types, our system is capable of generating effectively unbounded CAPTCHA instances. We exploit the persistent human-agent "Cognitive Gap" in interactive perception, memory, decision-making, and action. By engineering dynamic tasks that require adaptive intuition rather than granular planning, we re-establish a robust distinction between biological users and artificial agents, offering a scalable and diverse defense mechanism for the agentic era.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 32 of its 56 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Feb 2026.

Builds on

32 of 56 references.

References · 32

  1. 2020An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scalecited by 29,915
  2. 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,534
  3. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 1,908
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  5. 2024Thinking in Space: How Multimodal Large Language Models See, Remember, and Recall Spacescited by 580
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  7. 2025ScreenSpot-Pro: GUI Grounding for Professional High-Resolution Computer Usecited by 246
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  9. 2025Do generative video models understand physical principles?cited by 151
  10. 2024VideoRefer Suite: Advancing Spatial-Temporal Object Understanding with Video LLMcited by 71
  11. 2025IntPhys 2: Benchmarking Intuitive Physics Understanding In Complex Synthetic Environmentscited by 49
  12. 2025Perspective-Aware Reasoning in Vision-Language Models via Mental Imagery Simulationcited by 41
20 more
  1. 2025CAPTURe: Evaluating Spatial Reasoning in Vision Language Models via Occluded Object Countingcited by 36
  2. 2024What is the Visual Cognition Gap between Humans and Multimodal LLMs?cited by 30
  3. 2024Oedipus: LLM-enchanced Reasoning CAPTCHA Solvercited by 20
  4. 2025Time Blindness: Why Video-Language Models Can't See What Humans Can?cited by 17
  5. 2025CountQA: How Well Do MLLMs Count in the Wild?cited by 17
  6. 2025Your Vision-Language Model Can't Even Count to 20: Exposing the Failures of VLMs in Compositional Countingcited by 17
  7. 2025Open CaptchaWorld: A Comprehensive Web-based Platform for Testing and Benchmarking Multimodal LLM Agentscited by 14
  8. 2025IllusionCAPTCHA: A CAPTCHA based on Visual Illusioncited by 13
  9. 2024Breaking reCAPTCHAv2cited by 12
  10. 2025VisNumBench: Evaluating Number Sense of Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 12
  11. 2025MCA-Bench: A Multimodal Benchmark for Evaluating CAPTCHA Robustness Against VLM-based Attackscited by 10
  12. 2021An Object Detection based Solver for Google's Image reCAPTCHA v2cited by 8
  13. 2025On the Failure of Latent State Persistence in Large Language Modelscited by 8
  14. 2025Beyond the Visible: Benchmarking Occlusion Perception in Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 8
  15. 2025COGNITION: From Evaluation to Defense against Multimodal LLM CAPTCHA Solverscited by 4
  16. 2023CAPTCHA Types and Breaking Techniques: Design Issues, Challenges, and Future Research Directionscited by 3
  17. 2025Spatial CAPTCHA: Generatively Benchmarking Spatial Reasoning for Human-Machine Differentiationcited by 3
  18. 2025CAPTURE: A Benchmark and Evaluation for LVLMs in CAPTCHA Resolvingcited by 3
  19. 2026Beyond BeautifulSoup: Benchmarking LLM-Powered Web Scraping for Everyday Userscited by 1
  20. 2026VIPER Strike: Defeating Visual Reasoning CAPTCHAs via Structured Vision-Language Inferencecited by 1

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026CAPTCHA Solving for Native GUI Agents: Automated Reasoning-Action Data Generation and Self-Corrective Training
  2. 2026CaptchaMind: Training CAPTCHA Solvers via Reinforcement Learning with Explicit Reasoning Supervision
  3. 2026CaptchaArena: A Large-Scale, Fine-Grained Dataset for Training Computer-Use Agents on Interactive CAPTCHAs
  4. 2026Broken Gates: Re-evaluating Web Bot Defenses in the Age of LLM Agents
  5. 2025In-Context Defense in Computer Agents: An Empirical Study
  6. 2025BounTCHA: A CAPTCHA Utilizing Boundary Identification in Guided Generative AI-extended Videos
  7. 2025MLA-Trust: Benchmarking Trustworthiness of Multimodal LLM Agents in GUI Environments
  8. 2025Aura-CAPTCHA: A Reinforcement Learning and GAN-Enhanced Multi-Modal CAPTCHA System