mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

VISTA: An End-to-End Benchmark for Visual Spec-to-Web-App Coding Agents

arXiv 2605.26144 ↗First posted 22 May 2026cs.SE cs.AI cs.CVcited by 3

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Coding agents can now build applications from design mockups, but a screen that looks right is not an application that works. Existing benchmarks either score visual reconstruction without a backend or test full-stack functionality from textual requirements, and few tie scores to the individual components a design requires. We introduce VISTA (VIsual Spec-To-App), an end-to-end benchmark in which coding agents turn multi-page design handoffs (Figma renders, structure, and textual requirements) into runnable full-stack Web and Mobile (Android) applications. VISTA provides 8,487 human-annotated interactive components across 18 applications (126 Web pages and 576 Android screens) and an executable evaluator that locates annotated components in the running application and probes their interactions, yielding localization, behavior, and joint scores traceable to individual design requirements. Across 14 deployed coding-agent systems, the best joint score is 0.553 on Web and 0.378 on Mobile, and 13 of 14 systems score lower on behavior than on localization on Web. Component probes detect unresponsive controls in 90.1% of audited Web deliveries. Development traces show where the process departs from the task: 44.5% of trajectories never open the design screenshots, 73.0% omit the prescribed self-audit, and 8.3% report success after a failed check. VISTA makes the gap between rendering a design and delivering a working application measurable at the level of individual components. Code is available at hrefhttps://github.com/kaboider/VISTABench.

Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 12 of its 19 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 May 2026.

Builds on

12 of 19 references.

Closest ancestors · 2

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agents23 Jul
  2. 2024SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering6 May

Other references · 10

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
  2. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,393
  3. 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,053
  4. 2021Program Synthesis with Large Language Modelscited by 3,509
  5. 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,193
  6. 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,134
  7. 2023Large Language Models are not Fair Evaluatorscited by 1,050
  8. 2019CodeSearchNet Challenge: Evaluating the State of Semantic Code Searchcited by 638
  9. 2022The Stack: 3 TB of permissively licensed source codecited by 354
  10. 2024Design2Code: Benchmarking Multimodal Code Generation for Automated Front-End Engineeringcited by 146

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025WebVIA: A Web-based Vision-Language Agentic Framework for Interactive and Verifiable UI-to-Code Generation
  2. 2026WebCoderBench: Benchmarking Web Application Generation with Comprehensive and Interpretable Evaluation Metrics
  3. 2026Asuka-Bench: Benchmarking Code Agents on Underspecified User Intent and Multi-Round Refinement
  4. 2024AppWorld: A Controllable World of Apps and People for Benchmarking Interactive Coding Agents
  5. 2025WebGen-Bench: Evaluating LLMs on Generating Interactive and Functional Websites from Scratch
  6. 2026SWE-INTERACT: Reimagining SWE Benchmarks as User-Driven Long-Horizon Coding Sessions
  7. 2026FullStack-Agent: Enhancing Agentic Full-Stack Web Coding via Development-Oriented Testing and Repository Back-Translation
  8. 2026Vision2Web: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Visual Website Development with Agent Verification