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task automation

Task automation is the use of software to carry out a task, or a series of steps within a workflow, with little or no manual intervention. In software interfaces, it can involve an agent observing the interface and taking actions to complete a user-directed task, while checking results and responding to interruptions.

2 items

WorkArena: How Capable are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?

WorkArena: How Capable are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?

Alexandre Drouin, Maxime Gasse, Massimo Caccia, Issam H. Laradji, Manuel Del Verme, Tom Marty, David Vázquez, Nicolas Chapados, Alexandre Lacoste

OrganizationsMcGill UniversityMila – Québec Artificial Intelligence InstitutePolytechnique MontréalServiceNowUniversité de Montréal

Why you should read this

Introduces WorkArena and the BrowserGym environment to evaluate web agents on realistic enterprise workflows in ServiceNow, revealing critical automation limitations and a wide performance gap between open- and closed-source language models.

We study the use of large language model-based agents for interacting with software via web browsers. Unlike prior work, we focus on measuring the agents' ability to perform tasks that span the typical daily work of knowledge workers utilizing enterprise software systems. To this end, we propose WorkArena, a remote-hosted benchmark of 33 tasks based on the widely-used ServiceNow platform. We also introduce BrowserGym, an environment for the design and evaluation of such agents, offering a rich set of actions as well as multimodal observations. Our empirical evaluation reveals that while current agents show promise on WorkArena, there remains a considerable gap towards achieving full task automation. Notably, our analysis uncovers a significant performance disparity between open and closed-source LLMs, highlighting a critical area for future exploration and development in the field.

Added

2026-09-30

Instruction Agent: Enhancing Agent with Expert Demonstration

Instruction Agent: Enhancing Agent with Expert Demonstration

Yinheng Li, Hailey Hultquist, Justin Wagle, Kazuhito Koishida

OrganizationsMicrosoft

Why you should read this

Introduces Instruction Agent, a GUI automation framework that converts single expert demonstrations into verified, backtrackable execution steps, achieving a 60% success rate on complex OSWorld tasks that defeat all leading agents.

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents have advanced rapidly but still struggle with complex tasks involving novel UI elements, long-horizon actions, and personalized trajectories. In this work, we introduce Instruction Agent, a GUI agent that leverages expert demonstrations to solve such tasks, enabling completion of otherwise difficult workflows. Given a single demonstration, the agent extracts step-by-step instructions and executes them by strictly following the trajectory intended by the user, which avoids making mistakes during execution. The agent leverages the verifier and backtracker modules further to improve robustness. Both modules are critical to understand the current outcome from each action and handle unexpected interruptions(such as pop-up windows) during execution. Our experiments show that Instruction Agent achieves a 60% success rate on a set of tasks in OSWorld that all top-ranked agents failed to complete. The Instruction Agent offers a practical and extensible framework, bridging the gap between current GUI agents and reliable real-world GUI task automation.

Added

2026-09-29