mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Interaction-as-a-Judge

arXiv 2610.17895 ↗First posted 13 Oct 2026cs.LG cs.AI cs.SEcited by 0

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Coding agents are tasked with producing sophisticated interactive applications such as websites, desktop applications, and games. While humans assess these applications interactively, current automated LLM evaluations primarily focus on code analysis and unit tests. This mismatch can cause LLM judges to miss failures that are immediately apparent to human users. We study Interaction-as-a-Judge, an evaluation paradigm where computer-use agents (CUAs) directly interact with an application. We demonstrate that Interaction-as-a-Judge can improve both evaluation and generation of interactive applications. To this end, we collect and release two complementary datasets: 6,858 pairs of applications with human preferences and corresponding agent traces, and 222 applications with human-verified requirement labels. Relative to standard non-interactive approaches, we find that Interaction-as-a-Judge improves evaluation in terms of predicting human preferences (65.6% → 69.1%) and requirement verification (77.0% → 81.6%). We also observe scaling benefits: across both preference alignment and requirement verification, higher-quality interactions improve performance. Finally, through both inference- and training-time experiments, we demonstrate that Interaction-as-a-Judge can also improve the quality of generated artifacts. At inference time, Interaction-as-a-Judge repairs 75.5% of broken requirements within five attempts, compared to 55.4% for code-only self-feedback. At training time, using Interaction-as-a-Judge as a reward signal improves win-rate over the base model by 6.7pp while reducing both generated code length by 35.7% and build failure rates by 7.2pp compared to a code-only reward signal.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 13 of its 17 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2026.

Builds on

13 of 17 references.

Closest ancestors · 2

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026The Verification Horizon: No Silver Bullet for Coding Agent Rewards24 Jun
  2. 2026GameCraft-Bench: Can Agents Build Playable Games End-to-End in a Real Game Engine?16 Jun

Other references · 11

  1. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,971
  2. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,626
  3. 2017Deep reinforcement learning from human preferencescited by 3,912
  4. 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,195
  5. 2024Chatbot Arena: An Open Platform for Evaluating LLMs by Human Preferencecited by 1,184
  6. 2024Agent-as-a-Judge: Evaluate Agents with Agentscited by 238
  7. 2025ArtifactsBench: Bridging the Visual-Interactive Gap in LLM Code Generation Evaluationcited by 42
  8. 2025WebGen-Agent: Enhancing Interactive Website Generation with Multi-Level Feedback and Step-Level Reinforcement Learningcited by 15
  9. 2025You Don't Know Until You Click:Automated GUI Testing for Production-Ready Software Evaluationcited by 12
  10. 2025WebDevJudge: Evaluating (M)LLMs as Critiques for Web Development Qualitycited by 11
  11. 2026AutoRubric-T2I: Robust Rule-Based Reward Model for Text-to-Image Alignmentcited by 3

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  1. 2026SWE-Together: Evaluating Coding Agents in Interactive User Sessions
  2. 2026Getting Better at Working With You: Compiling User Corrections into Runtime Enforcement for Coding Agents
  3. 2026SWE-Journey: Towards More Realistic Evaluation of Coding Assistants through Long-Horizon, Multi-Turn Interaction
  4. 2026MiniAppBench: Evaluating the Shift from Text to Interactive HTML Responses in LLM-Powered Assistants
  5. 2026PrefIx: Understand and Adapt to User Preference in Human-Agent Interaction
  6. 2026SWE-INTERACT: Reimagining SWE Benchmarks as User-Driven Long-Horizon Coding Sessions
  7. 2026Coding-Agent Benchmarks Should Match Their Users' Task Flows
  8. 2025Ambig-SWE: Interactive Agents to Overcome Underspecificity in Software Engineering