ProSoftArena: Benchmarking Hierarchical Capabilities of Multi-modal Agents in Professional Software Environments

Abstract

Multi-modal agents are making rapid progress on general computer-use tasks. However, existing benchmarks remain largely confined to web browsers and rudimentary applications, failing to capture the professional software workflows that dominate real-world scientific and industrial practices. To bridge this gap, we introduce ProSoftArena, a comprehensive benchmark and platform specifically designed for evaluating multi-modal agents in professional software environments. We establish the first five-level capability hierarchy for professional software manipulation, and curate a benchmark of 456 realistic tasks spanning 6 disciplines and 13 core professional applications. To ensure reliable assessment, we build an executable real-computer environment with an execution-based evaluation framework, and uniquely incorporate a human-in-the-loop evaluation paradigm to quantify agents' collaborative efficiency. Extensive experiments show that even the best-performing agent achieves only a 20.6% success rate on software-level tasks (L2) and completely fails on multi-software workflows (L3). Our in-depth analysis further provides valuable insights in current agent limitations and suggests effective design principles for building more capable agents in professional software settings. This project is available at: https://prosoftarena.github.io.