WindowsWorld: A Process-Centric Benchmark of Autonomous GUI Agents in Professional Cross-Application Environments

arXiv cs.AI / 5/1/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces WindowsWorld, a new benchmark for autonomous GUI agents that evaluates performance in realistic cross-application, multi-step professional workflows rather than isolated single-app tasks.
  • WindowsWorld uses a multi-agent framework guided by 16 occupations to create four difficulty levels, with tasks refined via human review and executed in a simulated desktop environment.
  • The benchmark includes 181 tasks spanning 17 common desktop applications, where 78% of tasks inherently require coordination across multiple applications and average 5.0 sub-goals.
  • Experiments with leading large models and agents find very low success rates on multi-application tasks (<21%), difficulty with conditional judgment and reasoning across three or more apps, and low execution efficiency (failures even after exceeding human step limits).
  • The authors release code, benchmark data, and evaluation resources on GitHub to support further development and assessment of cross-application GUI agents.

Abstract

While GUI agents have shown impressive capabilities in common computer-use tasks such as OSWorld, current benchmarks mainly focus on isolated and single-application tasks. This overlooks a critical real-world requirement of coordinating across multiple applications to accomplish complex profession-specific workflows. To bridge this gap, we present a computer-use benchmark in cross-application workflows, named WindowsWorld, designed to systematically assess GUI Agents on complex multi-step tasks that mirror real-world professional activities. Our methodology uses a multi-agent framework steered by 16 occupations to generate four difficulty-level tasks with intermediate inspection, which are then refined by human review and executed in a simulated environment. The resulting benchmark contains 181 tasks with an average of 5.0 sub-goals across 17 common desktop applications, of which 78% are inherently multi-application. Experimental results of leading large models and agents show that: 1) All computer-use agents perform poorly on multi-application tasks (< 21% success rate), far below the performance of simple single-app tasks; 2) They largely fail at tasks requiring conditional judgment and reasoning across \geq 3 applications, stalling at early sub-goals; 3) Low execution efficiency, where tasks often fail despite far exceeding human step limits. Code, benchmark data, and evaluation resources are available at github.com/HITsz-TMG/WindowsWorld.