Nathan Bout

Nathan Bout, Maxime Langevin, Ronan Riochet

GUI agents - vision-based models that control desktops, web browsers, and mobile devices through graphical user interfaces - promise to automate a wide range of digital tasks. While million-scale datasets have enabled substantial progress on click-grounding, drag grounding (e.g. drag-and-drop, swipe, highlight) data remains an order of magnitude smaller and current models fall short on complex drag-based interactions. We introduce DragOn, a drag grounding benchmark and training dataset covering four domains: text highlighting, cell selection, element resizing and slider manipulation. The dataset comprises 286K training screenshots and 3.5M training tasks, plus a 2000-example held-out evaluation suite. We evaluate proprietary (GPT, Claude) and open-weight (Qwen, Kimi, Holo) models, as well as a Qwen VLM fine-tuned on our training data. Results suggest that our dataset could improve performance of state-of-the-art models on downstream computer-use tasks.

Mathieu Andreux, Breno Baldas Skuk, Hamza Benchekroun et al. · harvard, stanford

We present Surfer-H, a cost-efficient web agent that integrates Vision-Language Models (VLM) to perform user-defined tasks on the web. We pair it with Holo1, a new open-weight collection of VLMs specialized in web navigation and information extraction. Holo1 was trained on carefully curated data sources, including open-access web content, synthetic examples, and self-produced agentic data. Holo1 tops generalist User Interface (UI) benchmarks as well as our new web UI localization benchmark, WebClick. When powered by Holo1, Surfer-H achieves a 92.2% state-of-the-art performance on WebVoyager, striking a Pareto-optimal balance between accuracy and cost-efficiency. To accelerate research advancement in agentic systems, we are open-sourcing both our WebClick evaluation dataset and the Holo1 model weights.

Mathieu Andreux, Märt Bakler, Yanael Barbier et al. · cambridge

Building agents that generalize across web, desktop, and mobile environments remains an open challenge, as prior systems rely on environment-specific interfaces that limit cross-platform deployment. We introduce Surfer 2, a unified architecture operating purely from visual observations that achieves state-of-the-art performance across all three environments. Surfer 2 integrates hierarchical context management, decoupled planning and execution, and self-verification with adaptive recovery, enabling reliable operation over long task horizons. Our system achieves 97.1% accuracy on WebVoyager, 69.6% on WebArena, 60.1% on OSWorld, and 87.1% on AndroidWorld, outperforming all prior systems without task-specific fine-tuning. With multiple attempts, Surfer 2 exceeds human performance on all benchmarks. These results demonstrate that systematic orchestration amplifies foundation model capabilities and enables general-purpose computer control through visual interaction alone, while calling for a next-generation vision language model to achieve Pareto-optimal cost-efficiency.