Title: PPTArena: A Benchmark for Computer-Use Agents on PowerPoint Tasks
Primary area: datasets and benchmarks
Keywords: computer-use agents, benchmark, rubric, llm-as-a-judge, slide editing, powerpoint

Abstract: Creating and editing slides is a rich, multimodal activity that is ubiquitous in professional and educational settings, making it an ideal testbed for real-world computer-use agents. Microsoft PowerPoint is among the most widely adopted and feature-rich environments for presentation creation. We introduce PPTArena, a benchmark of 120 diverse PowerPoint tasks covering both content creation and presentation editing, organized by difficulty. A central challenge in this domain is evaluation: tasks are complex, multimodal, and often admit many valid solution strategies. Moreover, today’s agents frequently make only partial progress, which binary success metrics fail to capture. To address this, we design a robust evaluation framework to help create task-specific scoring rubrics for PowerPoint tasks. These rubrics award partial credit for intermediate steps, penalize unnecessary changes and poor aesthetics, and provide natural language feedback. We release PPTArena together with this evaluation framework, along with an analysis of common failure modes and lessons for rubric design.

TL;DR: We introduce PPTArena, a benchmark featuring 120 diverse PowerPoint tasks and robust grading scripts for evaluating computer-use agents, spanning both presentation editing and content creation scenarios.