mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

HLL: Can Agents Cross Humanity's Last Line of Verification?

arXiv 2606.02449 ↗First posted 1 Jun 2026cs.AI cs.CL cs.CVcited by 1

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Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal agents are increasingly expected to operate interfaces on behalf of users, raising a central deployment question: can they truly substitute for humans in workflows that services deliberately protect against automation? CAPTCHA verification makes this question concrete. It is not merely a visual puzzle, but a human-verification boundary placed before account creation, content access, form submission, and other protected actions. We introduce Humanity's Last Line of Verification (HLL), a controlled benchmark that uses interactive CAPTCHA verification to evaluate whether agents can cross this boundary through grounded, human-like interaction rather than recognition alone. HLL covers diverse CAPTCHA interactions and exposes agents to controlled realism stressors, including cluttered webpages, harder task variants, and trace-conditioned validation of the solving process. We evaluate eight frontier multimodal agents in a closed-loop GUI environment. The results show that current agents remain brittle at this human-substitution boundary: performance varies sharply across verification types, degrades under realistic interface conditions, and drops further when correct answers must be supported by valid action traces. By exposing gaps in localization, action calibration, state tracking, and process consistency, HLL provides a concrete testbed for measuring how close multimodal agents are to acting as human substitutes in protected real-world workflows. Our code is available at https://github.com/XinhaoS0101/HLL

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 42 of its 58 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2026.

Builds on

42 of 58 references.

References · 42

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30 more
  1. 2025BrowseComp: A Simple Yet Challenging Benchmark for Browsing Agentscited by 616
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