arXiv:2605.24528v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real world decision-making requires constructing mental models under uncertainty over evidence, over the underlying causal rules, and over the state of the world itself. Which computational principles underpin human inference under such conditions, and do LLM-based agents exhibit similar behavior given matching constraints? We address these questions using an inductive inference Box Task in which participants, human children and LLM-based agents, infer a latent cause through sequential interaction with an uncertain environment. We formalize this task as program induction with Bayesian particle-based inference, admitting two complementary interpretations: (1) as a constraint satisfaction process over hypotheses, and (2) as a program synthesis problem in which hypotheses are executable programs evaluated against evidence. Using the constraint-based formulation, we show that children's behavior is best explained by a combination of subjective evidence reliability and online hypothesis generation, accounting for both their evidence-seeking patterns and their dissociation between task completion and rule generalization. Using the program synthesis formulation, we treat LLM-based agents as model organisms: controllable systems that allow systematic manipulation of task conditions. Across backends, LLM-based agents replicate children's responses to changes in evidence reliability and observability, including discounting unreliable evidence, seeking to resolve partial information, and dissociating between task completion and causal generalization. At the same time, LLM-based agents tend to over-observe and over-comply with instructions relative to children. These results suggest that while children and LLM-based agents adapt similarly to environmental structure, their information-seeking behavior exhibits distinct underlying costs and inductive biases.

arXiv:2502.08047v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent progress in GUI agents has substantially improved visual grounding, yet robust planning remains challenging, particularly when the environment deviates from a canonical initial state. In real applications, users often invoke assistance mid-workflow, where software may be partially configured, steps may have been executed in different orders, or the interface may differ from its default setup. Such task-state variability is pervasive but insufficiently evaluated in existing GUI benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce WorldGUI, a benchmark covering ten widely used desktop and web applications with tasks instantiated under diverse, systematically constructed initial states. These variations capture realistic human-computer interaction settings and enable diagnostic evaluation of an agent's ability to recover, adapt plans, and handle non-default contexts. We further present WorldGUI-Agent, a simple and model-agnostic framework that organizes planning and execution around three critique stages, improving reliability in dynamic environments. Experiments demonstrate that state-of-the-art GUI agents exhibit substantial performance degradation under non-default initial conditions, revealing limited robustness and fragile planning behaviors. Our benchmark and framework provide a foundation for developing more adaptable and reliable GUI agents. The code and data are available at https://github.com/showlab/WorldGUI.