ComAct: New Paradigm for AI Software Agents Using Component Object Model
Researchers have proposed COM-as-Action, a new paradigm for AI agents to interact with professional software by treating Windows Component Object Model (COM) interfaces as executable actions rather than relying on visual GUI control. The work introduces ComCADBench, the first benchmark for AI agents operating real industrial CAD software, and develops ComActor, a self-correcting agent trained through a three-stage progressive framework. The approach addresses longstanding limitations of both GUI-based and API-based agents in professional software environments, achieving state-of-the-art performance where existing frontier models nearly fail entirely.
Current AI computer-use agents face fundamental challenges when operating professional software: GUI-based agents are brittle due to visual grounding errors and error accumulation over long task horizons, while API-based agents struggle with inconsistent protocols and inaccessible commercial interfaces. To address this, the authors identify the Windows Component Object Model (COM) as a unified, deterministic abstraction layer and propose reframing software interaction as program synthesis rather than sequential visual control. They introduce ComCADBench, the first benchmark specifically designed for agents working with real industrial CAD software, revealing a stark performance gap: frontier proprietary models achieve near-zero success under GUI-based interaction, while COM-based execution yields substantial immediate improvements. To close the remaining gap between syntactically correct code and geometrically accurate outputs, the team developed ComActor, a self-correcting agent trained via a three-stage progressive framework, supported by ComForge, a scalable platform for large-scale training in Windows containers. ComActor achieves state-of-the-art results on ComCADBench, demonstrates strong resilience on long-horizon tasks where baselines collapse, and generalizes to an external CAD benchmark, suggesting broad applicability of the paradigm.
What's missing
The generalizability of the COM-as-Action paradigm to non-Windows or non-COM-compatible professional software (e.g., Linux-based engineering tools) remains an open question. As a preprint, the work has not yet undergone peer review.
What different sources said
- arXiv cs.AICenter
ComAct: Reframing Professional Software Manipulation via COM-as-Action Paradigm
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