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AgentHijack: Benchmarking Computer Use Agent Robustness to Common Environment Corruptions

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AuthorsJingwei Sun et al.
Year2026
HF Upvotes3
arXiv2605.25707
PDFDownload
HF PageView on Hugging Face

Abstract

Autonomous computer use agents that powered by multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are emerging as capable assistants for completing complex digital workflows. However, real-world execution environments are far from ideal: pop-ups, resolution changes, and competing applications frequently interfere with agent perception and control. We introduce AgentHijack, a benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness of computer-use agents under common corruptions, where the uncertainties in dynamic environment disrupt the execution flow without direct adversarial intent. Specifically, AgentHijack introduces 9 configurable common corruptions to replicate realistic imperfect scenarios. We evaluate a variety of desktop tasks that utilize MLLM-based agents and discover that even minor instances of corruption can result in substantial performance degradation, which emphasizes the fragility of agents and underscores the necessity of robustness evaluation. Afterward, we propose AgentHijack-Agent, a framework that integrates an action generator with enhanced grounding capabilities and an onlooker responsible for behavior summarization and environment checking. Extensive experiments validate its effectiveness. Our code, environment, baseline models and data are publicly available at: https://AgentHijack.github.io.


Engineering Breakdown

The Problem

However, real-world execution environments are far from ideal: pop-ups, resolution changes, and competing applications frequently interfere with agent perception and control.

The Approach

We introduce AgentHijack, a benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness of computer-use agents under common corruptions, where the uncertainties in dynamic environment disrupt the execution flow without direct adversarial intent. Afterward, we propose AgentHijack-Agent, a framework that integrates an action generator with enhanced grounding capabilities and an onlooker responsible for behavior summarization and environment checking.

Key Results

Our code, environment, baseline models and data are publicly available at: https://AgentHijack.github.io.

Research Areas

This paper contributes to the following areas of AI/ML engineering:

  • Machine learning
  • Deep learning
  • Neural networks
  • Model optimization
  • AI systems
  • Agenthijack

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