Daily Papers

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents show promising capabilities for automating computer-use tasks and facilitating accessibility, but existing interactive benchmarks are mostly English-only, covering web-use or Windows, Linux, and Android environments, but not macOS. macOS is a major OS with distinctive GUI patterns and exclusive applications. To bridge the gaps, we present macOSWorld, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating GUI agents on macOS. macOSWorld features 202 multilingual interactive tasks across 30 applications (28 macOS-exclusive), with task instructions and OS interfaces offered in 5 languages (English, Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, and Russian). As GUI agents are shown to be vulnerable to deception attacks, macOSWorld also includes a dedicated safety benchmarking subset. Our evaluation on six GUI agents reveals a dramatic gap: proprietary computer-use agents lead at above 30% success rate, while open-source lightweight research models lag at below 2%, highlighting the need for macOS domain adaptation. Multilingual benchmarks also expose common weaknesses, especially in Arabic, with a 27.5% average degradation compared to English. Results from safety benchmarking also highlight that deception attacks are more general and demand immediate attention. macOSWorld is available at https://github.com/showlab/macosworld.

Private macOS frameworks underpin critical services and daemons but remain undocumented and distributed only as stripped binaries, complicating security analysis. We present MOTIF, an agentic framework that integrates tool-augmented analysis with a finetuned large language model specialized for Objective-C type inference. The agent manages runtime metadata extraction, binary inspection, and constraint checking, while the model generates candidate method signatures that are validated and refined into compilable headers. On MOTIF-Bench, a benchmark built from public frameworks with groundtruth headers, MOTIF improves signature recovery from 15% to 86% compared to baseline static analysis tooling, with consistent gains in tool-use correctness and inference stability. Case studies on private frameworks show that reconstructed headers compile, link, and facilitate downstream security research and vulnerability studies. By transforming opaque binaries into analyzable interfaces, MOTIF establishes a scalable foundation for systematic auditing of macOS internals.

Computer-use agents (CUAs) operate graphical user interfaces (GUIs) through vision and control primitives, and their capabilities have advanced rapidly, driven in part by standardized online evaluation benchmarks such as OSWorld, which serve both as evaluation tools and as training environments for reinforcement learning. However, macOS remains underserved in this landscape: the only existing benchmark, macOSWorld, covers a narrow slice of first-party applications with simpler tasks, and runs on x86 virtual machines incompatible with Apple Silicon. We introduce MacArena, a benchmark of 421 manually verified tasks spanning 50 applications that combines a curated port of OSWorld tasks, content sourced from macOSWorld, and 49 new macOS-native tasks, all running on Apple's native Virtualization framework on Apple Silicon. We argue that macOS presents distinct GUI challenges beyond what Linux-based benchmarks capture, and our evaluation supports this claim: strong model performance on existing benchmarks can reflect familiarity with task distributions rather than genuine cross-platform GUI competence. Notably, model rankings invert between ported and macOS-native tasks, with a leading model trailing by over 26% on the MacArena subset, suggesting that macOS poses a genuinely harder environment for current GUI agents.

Computer use agents (CUAs) have advanced rapidly in desktop automation, and a growing number of users deploy CUAs such as OpenClaw on Mac Mini for always-on automation. However, existing benchmarks, including those for macOS, evaluate agents without framework augmentation and rely on binary evaluation. As a result, they fail to capture both the framework capabilities leveraged by modern CUAs and the partial progress on long-horizon, multi-application tasks. We present MacAgentBench, a comprehensive macOS agent benchmark comprising 676 tasks across 25 applications, with nearly 60% involving both GUI and CLI interaction. The benchmark adopts deterministic rule-based evaluation and introduces fine-grained multi-checkpoint scoring with capability annotations for multi-application tasks. Experiments across three frameworks and 16 models show that the best configuration, Claude Opus 4.6 on OpenClaw, attains 73.7% Pass@1, while this advantage is primarily driven by the skill library rather than by framework design. Fine-grained metrics further reveal that models with similar Pass@1 can differ substantially in sub-goal completion. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/JetAstra/MacAgentBench.

Desktop accessibility metadata enables AI agents to interpret screens and supports users who depend on tools like screen readers. Yet, many applications remain largely inaccessible due to incomplete or missing metadata provided by developers - our investigation shows that only 33% of applications on macOS offer full accessibility support. While recent work on structured screen representation has primarily addressed specific challenges, such as UI element detection or captioning, none has attempted to capture the full complexity of desktop interfaces by replicating their entire hierarchical structure. To bridge this gap, we introduce Screen2AX, the first framework to automatically create real-time, tree-structured accessibility metadata from a single screenshot. Our method uses vision-language and object detection models to detect, describe, and organize UI elements hierarchically, mirroring macOS's system-level accessibility structure. To tackle the limited availability of data for macOS desktop applications, we compiled and publicly released three datasets encompassing 112 macOS applications, each annotated for UI element detection, grouping, and hierarchical accessibility metadata alongside corresponding screenshots. Screen2AX accurately infers hierarchy trees, achieving a 77% F1 score in reconstructing a complete accessibility tree. Crucially, these hierarchy trees improve the ability of autonomous agents to interpret and interact with complex desktop interfaces. We introduce Screen2AX-Task, a benchmark specifically designed for evaluating autonomous agent task execution in macOS desktop environments. Using this benchmark, we demonstrate that Screen2AX delivers a 2.2x performance improvement over native accessibility representations and surpasses the state-of-the-art OmniParser V2 system on the ScreenSpot benchmark.

Background. The recent surge in phishing attacks keeps undermining the effectiveness of the traditional anti-phishing blacklist approaches. On-device anti-phishing solutions are gaining popularity as they offer faster phishing detection locally. Aim. We aim to eliminate the delay in recognizing and recording phishing campaigns in databases via on-device solutions that identify phishing sites immediately when encountered by the user rather than waiting for a web crawler's scan to finish. Additionally, utilizing operating system-specific resources and frameworks, we aim to minimize the impact on system performance and depend on local processing to protect user privacy. Method. We propose a phishing detection solution that uses a combination of computer vision and on-device machine learning models to analyze websites in real time. Our reference-based approach analyzes the visual content of webpages, identifying phishing attempts through layout analysis, credential input areas detection, and brand impersonation criteria combination. Results. Our case study shows it's feasible to perform background processing on-device continuously, for the case of the web browser requiring the resource use of 16% of a single CPU core and less than 84MB of RAM on Apple M1 while maintaining the accuracy of brand logo detection at 46.6% (comparable with baselines), and of Credential Requiring Page detection at 98.1% (improving the baseline by 3.1%), within the test dataset. Conclusions. Our results demonstrate the potential of on-device, real-time phishing detection systems to enhance cybersecurity defensive technologies and extend the scope of phishing detection to more similar regions of interest, e.g., email clients and messenger windows.

Neurological diseases are the leading global cause of disability, yet most lack disease-modifying treatments. We present PROTON, a heterogeneous graph transformer that generates testable hypotheses across molecular, organoid, and clinical systems. To evaluate PROTON, we apply it to Parkinson's disease (PD), bipolar disorder (BD), and Alzheimer's disease (AD). In PD, PROTON linked genetic risk loci to genes essential for dopaminergic neuron survival and predicted pesticides toxic to patient-derived neurons, including the insecticide endosulfan, which ranked within the top 1.29% of predictions. In silico screens performed by PROTON reproduced six genome-wide α-synuclein experiments, including a split-ubiquitin yeast two-hybrid system (normalized enrichment score [NES] = 2.30, FDR-adjusted p < 1 times 10^{-4}), an ascorbate peroxidase proximity labeling assay (NES = 2.16, FDR < 1 times 10^{-4}), and a high-depth targeted exome sequencing study in 496 synucleinopathy patients (NES = 2.13, FDR < 1 times 10^{-4}). In BD, PROTON predicted calcitriol as a candidate drug that reversed proteomic alterations observed in cortical organoids derived from BD patients. In AD, we evaluated PROTON predictions in health records from n = 610,524 patients at Mass General Brigham, confirming that five PROTON-predicted drugs were associated with reduced seven-year dementia risk (minimum hazard ratio = 0.63, 95% CI: 0.53-0.75, p < 1 times 10^{-7}). PROTON generated neurological hypotheses that were evaluated across molecular, organoid, and clinical systems, defining a path for AI-driven discovery in neurological disease.