# DiagEval: Trajectory-Conditioned Diagnosis for Reliable Software Evaluation with GUI Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17439 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17439/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 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 50 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06770/) (2023)
- [WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13854/) (2023)
- [LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07974/) (2024)
- [OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07972/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Cannot Self-Correct Reasoning Yet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01798/) (2023)
- [ChatEval: Towards Better LLM-based Evaluators through Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07201/) (2023)
- [UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12326/) (2025)
- [SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10935/) (2024)
- [BigCodeBench: Benchmarking Code Generation with Diverse Function Calls and Complex Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15877/) (2024)
- [MLE-bench: Evaluating Machine Learning Agents on Machine Learning Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07095/) (2024)
- [AndroidWorld: A Dynamic Benchmarking Environment for Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14573/) (2024)
- [WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13919/) (2024)
- [Navigating the Digital World as Humans Do: Universal Visual Grounding for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05243/) (2024)
- [OS-ATLAS: A Foundation Action Model for Generalist GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23218/) (2024)
- [MLLM-as-a-Judge: Assessing Multimodal LLM-as-a-Judge with Vision-Language Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04788/) (2024)
- [JudgeLM: Fine-tuned Large Language Models are Scalable Judges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17631/) (2023)
- [RepoBench: Benchmarking Repository-Level Code Auto-Completion Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03091/) (2023)
- [Aguvis: Unified Pure Vision Agents for Autonomous GUI Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04454/) (2024)
- [Judging the Judges: Evaluating Alignment and Vulnerabilities in LLMs-as-Judges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12624/) (2024)
- [CrossCodeEval: A Diverse and Multilingual Benchmark for Cross-File Code Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11248/) (2023)
- [Aria-UI: Visual Grounding for GUI Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16256/) (2024)
- [AgenTracer: Who Is Inducing Failure in the LLM Agentic Systems?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03312/) (2025)
- [GUICourse: From General Vision Language Models to Versatile GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11317/) (2024)
- [SWE-Lancer: Can Frontier LLMs Earn 1 Million from Real-World Freelance Software Engineering?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12115/) (2025)
- [WebGen-Bench: Evaluating LLMs on Generating Interactive and Functional Websites from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03733/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [VideoVIBE: A Video-Grounded Diagnostic Benchmark for One-Shot Interactive Website Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09573/) (2026)
- [Can LLMs Fix It Without Code? Toward Automated Verification of No-Code Bug Fixes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11963/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Evaluating LLM-generated interactive software requires execution in addition to static analysis. The key difficulty is that correctness is a graph-level reachable property over latent UI state-transition graphs, whereas a GUI evaluator observes only a single execution trajectory. A failed rollout therefore rules out only one realized path, leaving failure attribution ambiguous between evaluator-side execution error and genuine software defect. We present DiagEval, a trajectory-conditioned diagnostic evaluation protocol for post-failure GUI-agent evaluation of interactive software. Rather than blindly retrying from scratch, DiagEval reuses the failed trajectory to choose targeted diagnostic probes and aggregates their outcomes into an internal attribution signal. The latent-graph view motivates the diagnostic problem; DiagEval does not reconstruct the graph or estimate calibrated posterior probabilities. We evaluate DiagEval on WebDevJudge-Unit and RealDevBench across multiple GUI-agent evaluators and LLM backbones. On false-negative cases, DiagEval recovers 45.6-62.1% of failures that were initially misattributed to software defects, outperforming retry-based baselines with 34.4-160.6% relative gains. On the full evaluation sets, this recovery improves accuracy from 69.9% to 78.3% on WebDevJudge-Unit and from 65.0% to 81.6% on RealDevBench. These results suggest that reliable GUI-agent evaluation requires not only stronger execution, but also active failure diagnosis to disambiguate evaluator-side errors from genuine software defects. Our code is available at https://github.com/scutGit/DiagEval.
