English

ProSoftArena: Benchmarking Hierarchical Capabilities of Multimodal Agents in Professional Software Environments

Software Engineering 2026-01-07 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Multimodal agents are making rapid progress on general computer-use tasks, yet existing benchmarks remain largely confined to browsers and basic desktop applications, falling short in professional software workflows that dominate real-world scientific and industrial practice. To close this gap, we introduce ProSoftArena, a benchmark and platform specifically for evaluating multimodal agents in professional software environments. We establish the first capability hierarchy tailored to agent use of professional software and construct a benchmark of 436 realistic work and research tasks spanning 6 disciplines and 13 core professional applications. To ensure reliable and reproducible assessment, we build an executable real-computer environment with an execution-based evaluation framework and uniquely incorporate a human-in-the-loop evaluation paradigm. Extensive experiments show that even the best-performing agent attains only a 24.4\% success rate on L2 tasks and completely fails on L3 multi-software workflow. In-depth analysis further provides valuable insights for addressing current agent limitations and more effective design principles, paving the way to build more capable agents in professional software settings. This project is available at: https://prosoftarena.github.io.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.02399,
  title  = {ProSoftArena: Benchmarking Hierarchical Capabilities of Multimodal Agents in Professional Software Environments},
  author = {Jiaxin Ai and Yukang Feng and Fanrui Zhang and Jianwen Sun and Zizhen Li and Chuanhao Li and Yifan Chang and Wenxiao Wu and Ruoxi Wang and Mingliang Zhai and Kaipeng Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.02399},
  year   = {2026}
}