ASIL: Replacing Screenshot-and-Click with Structured State and Semantic Actions

Abstract:Powerful code agents can execute scripts, call tools, and manage files, yet many important applications remain accessible primarily through graphical user interfaces. We argue that screenshot-and-click is an inefficient interface for software-operating agents: screenshots are state-incomplete, and GUI actions are brittle, semantically weak, and poorly matched to long-horizon planning. We introduce ASIL (Agent-Software Interaction Layer), an agent-native interface that exposes software through structured JSON observations and code-executable semantic actions, realized through the deepest feasible access path for each application. We instantiate ASIL across 15 applications and a benchmark of 300 single-application and 80 multi-application tasks. ASIL reaches above 80 with closed models while executing fewer than five actions per task. Under a repaired runtime and a 50-step screenshot budget, the same tasks yield 6.6 and 26.6 strict success under screenshot-and-click control, rising to 15.0 and 53.3 on an easier OSWorld-comparable band. Against application-native interfaces on matched tasks, ASIL exceeds LibreOffice's UNO API by 28-38 strict points but only matches this http URL's MCP content contract. The structured modality also suits training: small-scale SFT raises Qwen3.5-2B from 58.0 to 72.1 and Qwen3.5-9B from 66.6 to 80.4, and resource-limited on-policy RL further raises them to 74.4 and 82.2.

Accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2026. 19 pages, 7 figures: 9-page main paper followed by limitations, ethics, acknowledgments, references, and appendices A-E. Project page: this https URL

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2608.26991 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2608.26991v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.26991 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)