As foundation models evolve from information generation to digital work execution, agents are increasingly capable of completing complex tasks across tools, applications, and workflows. However, existing research lacks a unified perspective on how agents reliably accomplish delegated work. To address this gap, we present a work-centric, system-level perspective that views work agents as systems combining foundation models and runtime harnesses to execute tasks in stateful workspaces and deliver verifiable outcomes. We introduce two complementary dimensions, work persistence and work openness, to characterize working conditions, and classify digital work into five forms according to task scope and organization. Building on this framework, we identify five core capability families required for reliable work execution and examine approaches to model optimization, harness optimization, and their joint optimization. We further analyze existing evaluation methods and metrics from the perspective of work outcomes. Finally, we discuss future research directions, including sustained work delegation, adaptation to open environments, and the interaction between work execution and capability improvement. This paper provides a unified framework for understanding, optimizing, and evaluating work agents, supporting the development of systems capable of delivering reliable, verifiable, and practically valuable work outcomes.
Pengxiang Zhao, Guangyi Liu, Yaozhen Liang, Weiqing He, Zhengxi Lu, WenHao Wang, Yuehao Huang, Yuxiang Chai The Chinese University of Hong Kong 等 14 位作者
Shortcuts such as APIs and deep-links have emerged as efficient complements to flexible GUI operations, fostering a promising hybrid paradigm for MLLM-based mobile automation. However, systematic evaluation of GUI–shortcut hybrid agents remains largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce MAS-Bench, a benchmark that pioneers the evaluation of GUI-shortcut hybrid agents with a specific focus on the mobile domain. Beyond merely using predefined shortcuts, MAS-Bench assesses an agent’s capability to autonomously generate shortcuts by discovering and creating reusable, low-cost workflows. It features 139 complex tasks across 11 real-world applications, a knowledge base of 88 predefined shortcuts (APIs, deep-links, RPA scripts), and 9 evaluation metrics. Experiments demonstrate that hybrid agents achieve up to 68.3% success rate and 39% greater execution efficiency than GUI-only counterparts. Furthermore, our evaluation framework effectively reveals the quality gap between predefined and agent-generated shortcuts, validating its capability to assess shortcut generation methods. MAS-Bench addresses the lack of systematic benchmarks for GUI-shortcut hybrid mobile agents, providing a foundational platform for future advancements in creating more efficient and robust intelligent agents.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zhengxi Lu, Jiabo Ye, Fei Tang Nankai University, Yongliang Shen Zhejiang University, Haiyang Xu, Ziwei Zheng Xi'an Jiaotong University, Weiming Lu Zhejiang University, Ming Yan Alibaba Group 等 11 位作者
GUI agents have demonstrated remarkable progress in automating complex user interface interactions. However, training such agents for long-horizon tasks remains challenging. Single-turn reinforcement learning conditions on expert histories during training but self-generated histories during deployment, causing distribution mismatch. Online multi-turn methods eliminate this gap via environment interaction but suffer from sparse rewards and prohibitive costs. We propose \underline{\textbf{E}}xperience-driven \underline{\textbf{M}}ulti-turn \underline{\textbf{P}}olicy \underline{\textbf{O}}ptimization (\textbf{EMPO}), which leverages expert trajectories as environment experiences for on-policy multi-turn training. The agent constructs self-generated history throughout rollouts; when actions match expert experiences, the trajectory provides valid state transitions, and a Patch Module recovers mismatched steps to maintain on-policy rollouts. EMPO further incorporates discounted future rewards and dual-level advantage estimation to capture long-horizon dependencies. We also propose \textbf{AndroidControl-Real}, an evaluation metric strongly correlated with real-world performance (R^2=0.934). With only 1K public trajectories as RL experiences, our method achieves substantial gains over the base model (e.g., +12.0% on AndroidWorld and +23.8% on AITW) and achieves competitive performance against strong baselines such as UI-TARS-7B and GPT-4o, demonstrating better generalization than prior single-turn RL approaches. Code available: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/UI-S1-0DAF.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zhengxi Lu, Fei Tang Nankai University, Guangyi Liu, Jin Ma, Kaitao Song Apple, Xu Tan, Wenqi Zhang Zhejiang University, Weiming Lu Zhejiang University 等 11 位作者
MLLM-based GUI agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in complex user interface interaction tasks. However, long-horizon scenarios remain challenging, as these agents are burdened with tasks beyond their intrinsic capabilities, suffering from memory degradation, progress confusion, and math hallucination. To address these challenges, we present \textbf{UI-Copilot}, a collaborative framework where the GUI agent focuses on task execution while a lightweight copilot provides on-demand assistance for memory retrieval and numerical computation. We introduce memory decoupling to separate persistent observations from transient execution context, and train the policy agent to selectively invoke the copilot as Retriever or Calculator based on task demands. To enable effective tool invocation learning, we propose \underline{\textbf{T}}ool-\underline{\textbf{I}}ntegrated \underline{\textbf{P}}olicy \underline{\textbf{O}}ptimization (\textbf{TIPO}), which separately optimizes tool selection through single-turn prediction and task execution through on-policy multi-turn rollouts. Experimental results show that UI-Copilot-7B achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging MemGUI-Bench, outperforming strong 7B-scale GUI agents such as GUI-Owl-7B and UI-TARS-1.5-7B. Moreover, UI-Copilot-7B delivers a 17.1% absolute improvement on AndroidWorld over the base Qwen model, highlighting UI-Copilot’s strong generalization to real-world GUI tasks. Code website: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/UI-Copilot-0535.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表