Interaction-as-a-Judge

Abstract: Coding agents are tasked with producing sophisticated interactive applications such as websites, desktop applications, and games. While humans assess these applications interactively, current automated LLM evaluations primarily focus on code analysis and unit tests. This mismatch can cause LLM judges to miss failures that are immediately apparent to human users. We study Interaction-as-a-Judge, an evaluation paradigm where computer-use agents (CUAs) directly interact with an application. We demonstrate that Interaction-as-a-Judge can improve both \emph{evaluation} and \emph{generation} of interactive applications. To this end, we collect and release two complementary datasets: $6,858$ pairs of applications with human preferences and corresponding agent traces, and $222$ applications with human-verified requirement labels. Relative to standard non-interactive approaches, we find that Interaction-as-a-Judge improves evaluation in terms of predicting human preferences ($65.6\% \to 69.1\%$) and requirement verification ($77.0\% \to 81.6\%$). We also observe scaling benefits: across both preference alignment and requirement verification, higher-quality interactions improve performance. Finally, through both inference- and training-time experiments, we demonstrate that Interaction-as-a-Judge can also improve the quality of generated artifacts. At inference time, Interaction-as-a-Judge repairs $75.5\%$ of broken requirements within five attempts, compared to $55.4\%$ for code-only self-feedback. At training time, using Interaction-as-a-Judge as a reward signal improves win-rate over the base model by $6.7$pp while reducing both generated code length by $35.7\%$ and build failure rates by $7.2$pp compared to a code-only reward signal.