UFO: A UI-Focused AI Agent for Windows OS Interaction

Is this a way to automate /(create a UI macro) of windows applications? Sort of like AutoHotKey but with a nicer developing experience? Reading the page and watching the demo and I am still a bit confused about what it is.

The paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.07939.pdf) says it is a universal tool to automate all kinds of work on Windows apps, like generating an email in Outlook or building slides based on some documents on Powerpoint. Cross-app working seems to be bad for now.

On a side note, it looks like this thing can be a terrific cheating tool in Strategy video games..

It's more useful to use AI (or simply your human brain) to design good user interfaces in the first place, instead of using it to paper over flabbergastingly terrible user interface designs.

Not as impressive or interesting as CogAgent:

CogVLM: Visual Expert for Pretrained Language Models

CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agents

https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.08914

https://github.com/THUDM/CogVLM

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.08914.pdf

CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agents

Abstract

People are spending an enormous amount of time on digital devices through graphical user interfaces (GUIs), e.g., computer or smartphone screens. Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT can assist people in tasks like writing emails, but struggle to understand and interact with GUIs, thus limiting their potential to increase automation levels. In this paper, we introduce CogAgent, an 18-billion-parameter visual language model (VLM) specializing in GUI understanding and navigation. By utilizing both low-resolution and high-resolution image encoders, CogAgent supports input at a resolution of 1120×1120, enabling it to recognize tiny page elements and text. As a generalist visual language model, CogAgent achieves the state of the art on five text-rich and four general VQA benchmarks, including VQAv2, OK-VQA, Text-VQA, ST-VQA, ChartQA, infoVQA, DocVQA, MM-Vet, and POPE. CogAgent, using only screenshots as input, outperforms LLM-based methods that consume extracted HTML text on both PC and Android GUI navigation tasks—Mind2Web and AITW, advancing the state of the art. The model and codes are available at https://github.com/THUDM/CogVLM .

1. Introduction

Autonomous agents in the digital world are ideal assistants that many modern people dream of. Picture this scenario: You type in a task description, then relax and enjoy a cup of coffee while watching tasks like booking tickets online, conducting web searches, managing files, and creating PowerPoint presentations get completed automatically.

Recently, the emergence of agents based on large language models (LLMs) is bringing us closer to this dream. For example, AutoGPT [33], a 150,000-star open-source project, leverages ChatGPT [29] to integrate language understanding with pre-defined actions like Google searches and local file operations. Researchers are also starting to develop agent-oriented LLMs [7, 42]. However, the potential of purely language-based agents is quite limited in realworld scenarios, as most applications interact with humans through Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), which are characterized by the following perspectives:

• Standard APIs for interaction are often lacking.

• Important information including icons, images, diagrams, and spatial relations are difficult to directly convey in words.

• Even in text-rendered GUIs like web pages, elements like canvas and iframe cannot be parsed to grasp their functionality via HTML.

Agents based on visual language models (VLMs) have the potential to overcome these limitations. Instead of relying exclusively on textual inputs such as HTML [28] or OCR results [31], VLM-based agents directly perceive visual GUI signals. Since GUIs are designed for human users, VLM-based agents can perform as effectively as humans, as long as the VLMs match human-level vision understanding. In addition, VLMs are also capable of skills such as extremely fast reading and programming that are usually beyond the reach of most human users, extending the potential of VLM-based agents. A few prior studies utilized visual features merely as auxiliaries in specific scenarios. e.g. WebShop [39] which employs visual features primarily for object recognition purposes. With the rapid development of VLM, can we naturally achieve universality on GUIs by relying solely on visual inputs?

In this work, we present CogAgent, a visual language foundation model specializing in GUI understanding and planning while maintaining a strong ability for general cross-modality tasks. By building upon CogVLM [38]—a recent open-source VLM, CogAgent tackles the following challenges for building GUI agents: [...]

This is a paper?