Papers for

qa automation teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Scalable system verifies hybrid computer-use agents across platforms

RecreationWorld: Scalable and Verifiable Environments for Hybrid Computer-Use Agents

Abstract: Computer-use agents (CUAs) have advanced along two separate lines: graphical interaction and software development through code and the command line. Real digital work requires both, interleaved rather than stacked end to end. We study hybrid CUAs that autonomously decide when to explore an interface, implement software, and run and visually verify their artifacts. We introduce RecreationWorld, a five-platform framework built around recreation: given a running reference, an agent must discover its behavior and build a faithful implementation with no prescribed workflow. RecreationWorld provides reproducible environments on Ubuntu, macOS, Windows, Android, and Web, plus a unified harness with native GUI control and coding tools. The running reference serves as an oracle for hidden behavioral tests, providing execution-grounded rewards. We scale trajectory generation with high-quality open-source applications. Models trained on these trajectories improve across five out-of-distribution coding and hybrid computer-use benchmarks and more frequently verify their rendered outputs, providing evidence of transfer beyond recreation. For held-out evaluation, we introduce RecreationBench, comprising 250 diverse tasks across domains and platforms. Reference-grounded programmatic and visual assertions cover action-conditioned outcomes at multiple interaction depths; each is validated on the reference and by human reviewers before the suite is frozen for automatic scoring. GPT-6 Astra leads at 58.1% overall, but passes all programmatic tests on just 2.8% of tasks. Agents reproduce static interface structure more reliably than interactions and computed outputs, while generated applications remain smaller and more monolithic than their references. We release the benchmark, environments, and test suites.

Fri 18 SeptComputation and LanguageSoftware Engineering
The gist
Computer-use agents can either interact graphically or write code, but real digital tasks mix both. The authors created RecreationWorld, a system where agents learn by studying a working example on multiple platforms without fixed steps. The system tests how well agents can recreate software by watching and coding, rewarding them when their work matches the example. They also made a big set of tasks and tests, showing agents do better on interface design than on complex interactions or outputs. This helps move toward smarter software agents that can both use and build digital tools.
Open 2609.22000v1

Mobile gui agents evaluated with realistic and repeatable simulated apps

APPSim-Bench: Bridging Real-world Apps and Reproducible Evaluation for Mobile GUI Agents

Abstract: Mobile GUI agents can execute tasks from natural-language instructions, but their evaluation remains difficult to make both realistic and reproducible. Existing benchmarks typically trade off these goals: simplified apps lack real-world mobile complexity, whereas live commercial apps introduce uncontrolled variation from recommendations, advertisements, accounts, and changing content. We propose AppSim-Bench, which addresses this trade-off through controllable simulated apps that preserve task-relevant interaction logic while supporting deterministic evaluation. Built through a coding-agent-assisted and human-verified workflow, it contains 557 tasks across 17 high-frequency Chinese and English apps. Its controllable backend data and outcome-based verification remove major sources of environmental stochasticity, enabling reproducible cross-model comparison. Evaluating 19 GUI agents, spanning general-purpose and GUI-specialized systems, we find that autonomous mobile execution remains far from solved. The best model completes only 50.27% of tasks, and 28.55% of tasks are not solved by any agent. Further analysis shows that failures concentrate in longer workflows, numerical reasoning tasks, and inefficient trajectories marked by high action overhead and budget exhaustion. Our project is available at https://github.com/Acrab-Agentic-Labs/AppSim.

Mon 7 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
It is hard to test phone app assistants because real apps change often and simplified apps don't feel real. The researchers created a set of simulated apps that behave like real ones but can be tested the same way every time. They made 557 tasks from popular apps and measured how well 19 different agents could do them. The best assistant only finished about half the tasks, showing there is more work to do. Most mistakes happened in harder tasks, like long sequences or math problems.
Open 2609.07712v1