DeskCraft: Benchmarking Desktop Agents on Professional Workflows and Human-in-the-Loop Collaboration
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → GUI and mobile agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Real-world professional desktop workflows in specialized creative and engineering software unfold over long horizons and often require human-in-the-loop coordination, where agents proactively seek necessary information and users provide additional instructions, clarifications, feedback, or corrections as the task progresses. Yet existing desktop GUI benchmarks mostly reduce this setting to short, simplified tasks with all user instructions provided upfront. To address this issue, we introduce DeskCraft, a desktop GUI benchmark targeting long horizon creative and engineering workflows and proactive human-agent collaboration. DeskCraft organizes tasks into a multilevel difficulty taxonomy, with long horizon tasks requiring over 50 execution steps, and covers professional creative software across design, video, audio, and 3D creation. Furthermore, DeskCraft formalizes human-agent collaboration into an interaction protocol covering mid-turn and post-turn exchanges. Mid-turn interaction captures both agent-initiated clarification under uncertainty and user-initiated interruption during execution, while post-turn interaction accommodates user-driven feedback after the agent signals completion, together spanning the full space of realistic collaboration patterns. We evaluate 18 proprietary and open source agents on 538 tasks and find that GPT-5.4 reaches 31.6% on standard tasks and 27.6% on interactive tasks. Further analyses reveal persistent failures in long horizon workflow delivery and proactive clarification. We will open-source all evaluation codes, tasks, and data at https://github.com/mrwwk/DeskCraft.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in GUI and mobile agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 12 of its 28 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2026.
Builds on
12 of 28 references.
Closest ancestors · 8
Same direction, newest first
- 2026Mobile-Agent-v3.5: Multi-platform Fundamental GUI Agents15 Feb
- 2025MobileWorld: Benchmarking Autonomous Mobile Agents in Agent-User Interactive and MCP-Augmented Environments22 Dec
- 2025OSWorld-MCP: Benchmarking MCP Tool Invocation In Computer-Use Agents28 Oct
- 2025ScreenSpot-Pro: GUI Grounding for Professional High-Resolution Computer Use4 Apr
- 2025Agent S2: A Compositional Generalist-Specialist Framework for Computer Use Agents1 Apr
- 2025WorldGUI: An Interactive Benchmark for Desktop GUI Automation from Any Starting Point12 Feb
- 2024Windows Agent Arena: Evaluating Multi-Modal OS Agents at Scale12 Sep
- 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environments11 Apr
Other references · 4
- 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 1,908
- 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,280
- 2023GAIA: a benchmark for General AI Assistantscited by 1,084
- 2024TheAgentCompany: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Consequential Real World Taskscited by 306
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.
4 papers.
- 2026AutoGUIWorld: Image Generators as Visual World Models for GUI Agent1 Oct 2026
- 2026OPERA: A Unified Omnimodal Progressive Spatio-Temporal Reasoning Agent for Referring Video Segmentation27 Sep 2026
- 2026UI-Venus-2 Technical Report27 Aug 2026
- 2026How Benchmarks Mis-Score Computer-Use Agents30 Jul 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Workflow-GYM: Towards Long-Horizon Evaluation of Computer-use Agentic tasks in Real-World Professional Fields
- 2026Covering Human Action Space for Computer Use: Data Synthesis and Benchmark
- 2025UI-Vision: A Desktop-centric GUI Benchmark for Visual Perception and Interaction
- 2026Beyond Sequential Interaction: Benchmarking Parallel Execution and Coordination for GUI Agents
- 2026WindowsWorld: A Process-Centric Benchmark of Autonomous GUI Agents in Professional Cross-Application Environments
- 2026CutVerse: A Compositional GUI Agents Benchmark for Media Post-Production Editing
- 2025GraphicBench: A Planning Benchmark for Graphic Design with Language Agents
- 2026Coding-Agent Benchmarks Should Match Their Users' Task Flows