Beyond Sequential Interaction: Benchmarking Parallel Execution and Coordination for GUI Agents

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents are systems powered by large multimodal models (LMMs). They perceive screen state and execute user instructions through GUI actions such as clicking, typing, and scrolling on desktops and mobile devices. However, current agents scale poorly to long-horizon tasks: actions incur costly LMM inferences, and performance degrades as context grows. Humans divide such workloads among collaborators who complete sub-tasks in parallel. Yet parallel coordination among GUI agents has received little attention. To close this gap, we introduce ParaGUIBench, to our knowledge, the first benchmark dedicated to parallel execution and coordination of multiple GUI agents on separate desktop instances. It consists of three components: a multi-device Docker infrastructure with a shared file system; a dataset of 233 tasks spanning six task categories; and an evaluation system with efficiency metrics, including step reduction ratio and token cost. We further introduce ParaGUI, a planner-worker agent that decomposes GUI tasks and dispatches sub-tasks to concurrent workers on separate desktop instances. On ParaGUIBench, ParaGUI reaches a 46.4% success rate, outperforming the strongest serial baseline (Claude Sonnet 4.6) by 12.9 points while using roughly half the steps and less than half the tokens. These results show that parallel execution can improve both success rate and efficiency on decomposable, long-horizon GUI tasks, pointing to a direction worth further study.

GUI Knowledge Bench: Revealing the Knowledge Gap Behind VLM Failures in GUI Tasks

Large vision language models (VLMs) have advanced graphical user interface (GUI) task automation but still lag behind humans. We hypothesize this gap stems from missing core GUI knowledge, which existing training schemes (such as supervised fine tuning and reinforcement learning) alone cannot fully address. By analyzing common failure patterns in GUI task execution, we distill GUI knowledge into three dimensions: (1) interface perception, knowledge about recognizing widgets and system states; (2) interaction prediction, knowledge about reasoning action state transitions; and (3) instruction understanding, knowledge about planning, verifying, and assessing task completion progress. We further introduce GUI Knowledge Bench, a benchmark with multiple choice and yes/no questions across six platforms (Web, Android, MacOS, Windows, Linux, IOS) and 292 applications. Our evaluation shows that current VLMs identify widget functions but struggle with perceiving system states, predicting actions, and verifying task completion. Experiments on real world GUI tasks further validate the close link between GUI knowledge and task success. By providing a structured framework for assessing GUI knowledge, our work supports the selection of VLMs with greater potential prior to downstream training and provides insights for building more capable GUI agents.