OpenApps: Simulating Environment Variations to Measure UI-Agent Reliability
This addresses a blind spot in reliability measurement for autonomous UI-agents, which is crucial for user trust, though it is incremental as it introduces a new evaluation dimension rather than a novel agent method.
The paper tackles the problem of evaluating UI-agent reliability across app variations by developing OpenApps, a configurable ecosystem, and finds that task success rates for leading agents can fluctuate by over 50% across different app versions, such as Kimi-VL-3B dropping from 63% to 4%.
Reliability is key to realizing the promise of autonomous UI-Agents, multimodal agents that directly interact with apps in the same manner as humans, as users must be able to trust an agent to complete a given task. Current evaluations rely on fixed environments, often clones of existing apps, which are limited in that they can only shed light on whether or how often an agent can complete a task within a specific environment. When deployed however, agents are likely to encounter variations in app design and content that can affect an agent's ability to complete a task. To address this blind spot of measuring agent reliability across app variations, we develop OpenApps, a light-weight open-source ecosystem with six apps (messenger, calendar, maps, etc.) that are configurable in appearance and content. OpenApps requires just a single CPU to run, enabling easy generation and deployment of thousands of versions of each app. Specifically, we run more than 10,000 independent evaluations to study reliability across seven leading multimodal agents. We find that while standard reliability within a fixed app is relatively stable, reliability can vary drastically when measured across app variations. Task success rates for many agents can fluctuate by more than $50\%$ across app variations. For example, Kimi-VL-3B's average success across all tasks fluctuates from $63\%$ to just $4\%$ across app versions. We also find agent behaviors such as looping or hallucinating actions can differ drastically depending on the environment configuration. These initial findings highlight the importance of measuring reliability along this new dimension of app variations. OpenApps is available at https://facebookresearch.github.io/OpenApps/