Proactive Agent Research Environment: Simulating Active Users to Evaluate Proactive Assistants

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 1 Apr 2026] Proactive Agent Research Environment: Simulating Active Users to Evaluate Proactive Assistants Deepak Nathani, Cheng Zhang, Chang Huan, Jiaming Shan, Yinfei Yang, Alkesh Patel, Zhe Gan, William Yang Wang, Michael Saxon, Xin Eric Wang Proactive agents that anticipate user needs and autonomously execute tasks hold great promise as digital assistants, yet the lack of realistic user simulation frameworks hinders their development. Existing approaches model apps as flat tool-calling APIs, failing to capture the stateful and sequential nature of user interaction in digital environments and making realistic user simulation infeasible. We introduce Proactive Agent Research Environment (Pare), a framework for building and evaluating proactive agents in digital environments. Pare models applications as finite state machines with stateful navigation and state-dependent action space for the user simulator, enabling active user simulation. Building on this foundation, we present Pare-Bench, a benchmark of 143 diverse tasks spanning communication, productivity, scheduling, and lifestyle apps, designed to test context observation, goal inference, intervention timing, and multi-app orchestration. Comments: 34 pages, 8 figures, 5 tables Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) Cite as: arXiv:2604.00842 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2604.00842v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.00842 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Deepak Nathani [view email] [v1] Wed, 1 Apr 2026 12:53:01 UTC (12,457 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.LG cs.MA References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)