[HN Gopher] OmniParser for Pure Vision Based GUI Agent
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       OmniParser for Pure Vision Based GUI Agent
        
       Author : fzliu
       Score  : 139 points
       Date   : 2024-10-25 18:54 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (microsoft.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (microsoft.github.io)
        
       | jauntywundrkind wrote:
       | I have a little bit of a vice of enjoying some "idle" games. I
       | have intended to do some very basic manual screen carving & ocr &
       | computer vision to try to "read" my state in these games, & have
       | multi-actor "play" models for them, just for fun really & to
       | decrease time sunk gaming (by spending significant time
       | coding/learning).
       | 
       | This certainly seems like it has a lot of promise to make that
       | much much much easier. Game UI's are less uniform so maybe this
       | might be harder or not easily be applicable, but hopefully
        
         | _adamb wrote:
         | As someone who has done this to many games over a few decades,
         | I can definitively say: 100% of the time, it ruins the fun of
         | the game.
         | 
         | I can't say exactly why. Maybe you feel like you haven't earned
         | it. Maybe it's the idle nature of farming that we really
         | enjoy...
        
           | fragmede wrote:
           | Depends what you consider fun, and how far you take it. Some
           | people enjoy programming more than repetitive clicking in a
           | GUI. For a clicker game, writing a bot lets you iterate on
           | strategies easier - is it faster to get to level 2 if I buy
           | the upgrade for A or B first? For Trackmania, it lets you get
           | a world record and a YouTube video with 14M views.
           | 
           | https://youtu.be/Dw3BZ6O_8LY
        
             | jauntywundrkind wrote:
             | Yeah. I appreciate the warning & enjoy the personal tail,
             | but it's just that guys story & it's being projected as an
             | absolute.
             | 
             | If I don't enjoy the experience anymore that's fine with me
             | too. I think I'd still feel a sense of accomplishment, feel
             | like I'd advanced as a human and mastered my environment
             | and machines for diving in here.
             | 
             | I don't feel the agency I want to have. These games make me
             | want to extend myself, my agency. Playing them manually
             | offers some very low grade enjoyment but that sense of
             | missing out gnaws at me, and I'm not at all dissuaded by
             | parent trying to ward me off, and if I do end up winning so
             | hard I don't care anymore, me right now would regard that
             | as a victory condition & rief from this pressure I feel
             | about ineffectively plodding through as I do now.
        
         | nmstoker wrote:
         | You might want to look at Serpent AI: granted the repo is now
         | in an archived state, but it did similar things to those you
         | mention.
         | 
         | https://github.com/SerpentAI/SerpentAI
        
       | trq_ wrote:
       | This is awesome, can't wait for evals against Claude Computer
       | Use!
        
         | amelius wrote:
         | Can we first test this with basic sysadmin work in a simple
         | shell?
         | 
         | Can't wait to replace "apt get install" by "gpt get install"
         | and then have it solve all the dependency errors by itself.
        
           | anonym29 wrote:
           | Threat actors can't wait for you to start doing this either.
        
         | asdev wrote:
         | how can you write metrics against something that's non
         | deterministic?
        
       | Smaug123 wrote:
       | To a considerable extent, we are stuck in the world we live in;
       | but I am reminded of a quote by Guillaume Allais:
       | 
       | > My entire job seems to be repeating variations of "never start
       | by forgetting the user's stated intent only to then attempt to
       | guess it".
        
       | akshayKMR wrote:
       | Does it also tell the coordinates (x,y) of the annotated box
       | w.r.t. the screenshot dimensions?
        
       | s3tt3mbr1n1 wrote:
       | Has anyone gotten this to work?
       | 
       | Copying the repo and downloading the models through HuggingFace
       | or manually does not seem to work, you get errors indicating
       | missing files.
        
         | suriya-ganesh wrote:
         | I tried as well. Seems like it is a proprietary model.
        
           | dartos wrote:
           | FOSS-washing?
        
             | nmstoker wrote:
             | This literally just published, IMHO it's a little premature
             | to be accusing them of that at such an early stage.
             | 
             | More likely they just slipped up with getting everything
             | uploaded properly - it's easily done, and luckily easily
             | corrected, so we'll likely see issues get resolved fairly
             | swiftly.
        
               | nmstoker wrote:
               | See my more detailed comments above but I confirm this is
               | working.
               | 
               | Looks like a few tweaks made to the github repo ~13 hours
               | ago which may explain the issues those had earlier and
               | why it's now fine for me.
        
           | bbor wrote:
           | :( I was so, so excited to try this when I found it
           | yesterday, it has like 3 star emojis in my list of models.
           | I'll post here if I get it working tomorrow, I guess. I doubt
           | they'd release a model on HF without intending to make it
           | useable
           | 
           | EDIT; surely it's just broken, the repo does include
           | .safetensor weights. Maybe the problem is the
           | "suspicious"-flagged PyTorch weight for "icon detection",
           | whatever that means?
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | Can it detect ads and mask them out?
        
         | bee_rider wrote:
         | If these sorts of tools kill the ad business, it would be so
         | incredibly cool, and justify Nvidia's half-of-the-economy-or-
         | whatever market cap.
        
           | dartos wrote:
           | Only like 6%
        
           | amelius wrote:
           | Let's hope so! But now that I'm thinking about it more:
           | nvidia might go into the advertisement business themselves :(
        
         | dymk wrote:
         | I'm reminded of Permutation City where your personal AI
         | intercepts ads sent to you, but ad companies of course have
         | their own AI for tricking your AI, so of course you have a
         | countermeasure AI to intercept that, and so on and so forth
        
       | patrickhogan1 wrote:
       | Since this is a research paper with promising ideas but non-
       | functional code, what are people using as the best-in-class
       | agents for computer automation? For example:
       | 
       | 1. Claude for computer use
       | 
       | 2. Various startup offerings--if you have recommendations, please
       | list them
       | 
       | 3. Established tools like Playwright, Selenium, and WebDriver,
       | combined with screenshots and LLM-based guidance
       | 
       | What tools or approaches are actually working for building useful
       | automation solutions?
        
         | nmstoker wrote:
         | Are you sure about the non-working code point?
         | 
         | I've yet to try it but my understanding is the repo here has
         | got working code along with installation instructions:
         | 
         | https://github.com/microsoft/OmniParser
        
           | nmstoker wrote:
           | I confirm it works: I got the gradio demo working locally and
           | it's pretty reasonable.
           | 
           | Slight rough edges (to be expected) and you do need to read
           | the README with attention but it's all par for the course. I
           | had to install einops which wasn't in the requirements.txt
           | and even though I had downloaded the HF models they released,
           | it still needed to pull in another model when I first ran the
           | demo.
        
         | tomatohs wrote:
         | our agent is available via NPM: http://testdriver.ai
        
       | anonzzzies wrote:
       | Computer Use, Agent.exe and so on, but nothing actually is useful
       | yet. It's all very terrible. And then to think we had perfection
       | already (and Claude is good at it); emacs... No need for any of
       | this; everything can be scripted.
        
       | deergomoo wrote:
       | One thing I have found very odd about the current wave of AI
       | tools is that there seems to be an unspoken element of giving up
       | and admitting failure in other areas of computing.
       | 
       | Programming copilots are often sold on how they can automate
       | drudgery and boilerplate, which implies we are incapable of or
       | uninterested in designing programming languages, tools, and
       | patterns which do not require boilerplate or drudgery.
       | 
       | Teaching models to use traditional GUI apps implies we have given
       | up on or are not even bothering to create proper hooks for an
       | automation system to utilise.
       | 
       | Something about it feels wrong to me, because it bakes existing
       | inefficiencies into the system. Can we really not solve the
       | inefficiencies instead of pouring unfathomable amounts of compute
       | into working around them?
        
         | Fulgen wrote:
         | Focusing on the GUI applications: There have been a few GUI
         | automation solutions over the years - since the post's software
         | is from MS, I'll take UI Automation as an example. Works well
         | with Win32 controls, not sure how well it works with the XAML-
         | based toolkits.
         | 
         | But not all software is written with those UI frameworks. Some
         | use different widget frameworks, some immediate GUIs, others
         | just render a webpage and either use HTML or fully render the
         | controls themselves. And without everybody using the same
         | standard, the only standard we have for parsing their output is
         | the pixels they render to.
        
         | mountainriver wrote:
         | Computer based agents have no limits, that's the advantage.
         | Sure a proper automation hook is better if its available, but a
         | lot of the time it isn't, either due to lack of resources or
         | monopolistic behavior
        
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       (page generated 2024-10-26 23:04 UTC)