Multimodal agentic pipelines are transforming human-computer interaction by enabling efficient and accessible automation of complex, real-world tasks. However, recent efforts have focused on short-horizon or general-purpose applications (e.g., mobile or desktop interfaces), leaving long-horizon automation for domain-specific systems, particularly in healthcare, largely unexplored. To address this, we introduce CareFlow, a high-quality human-annotated benchmark comprising complex, long-horizon software workflows across medical annotation tools, DICOM viewers, EHR systems, and laboratory information systems. On this benchmark, existing vision-language models (VLMs) perform poorly, struggling with long-horizon reasoning and multi-step interactions in medical contexts. To overcome this, we propose CarePilot, a multi-agent framework based on the actor-critic paradigm. The Actor integrates tool grounding with dual-memory mechanisms (long-term and short-term experience) to predict the next semantic action from the visual interface and system state. The Critic evaluates each action, updates memory based on observed effects, and either executes or provides corrective feedback to refine the workflow. Through iterative agentic simulation, the Actor learns to perform more robust and reasoning-aware predictions during inference. Our experiments show that CarePilot achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong closed-source and open-source multimodal baselines by approximately 15.26% and 3.38%, respectively, on our benchmark and out-of-distribution dataset.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: CareFlow is a large-scale benchmark for evaluating multimodal agents on a range of real healthcare software. It enables execution-based evaluation and interactive reasoning across DICOM viewers, image annotation tools, EMR/EHR, and LIS platforms. Each task pairs a natural-language goal with GUI screenshots representing authentic clinical workflows.
Figure 2: Overview of the CarePilot framework. An Actor–Critic multi-agent architecture governs hierarchical decision-making for long-horizon healthcare workflows. At each step, the Actor observes the current interface and instruction, integrates tool-grounding signals, and its past experience that is stored in short- and long-term memories, and predicts the next semantic action. The Critic evaluates outcomes, provides corrective feedback, and updates both short-term and long-term memory buffers to guide subsequent decisions.
Figure 3: Distribution of task lengths (number of steps) in the test split of CareFlow .
Figure 4: Category distribution of tasks in CareFlow across four major healthcare software domains.
Function
Description
CLICK
Move the cursor (if needed) and click at the specified item in the screen
SCROLL
Scroll the active view vertically or horizontally by n units.
ZOOM
Adjust the magnification level of the displayed image or view.
TEXT
Type string s into the focused input field (e.g., patient ID, study date, filter query).
SEGMENT
Create or edit a segmentation or region of interest (ROI) on the displayed medical image.
COMPLETE
Mark the workflow or task as finished.
Table 1: Core mouse and keyboard actions in CarePilot . Arguments in parentheses denote examples; (x,y) are pixel coordinates, n is a signed step count, and s is a text string.
Split
# Tasks
Avg. Steps
Min
Max
OOD
Actions
Train
735
12.7
7
22
–
6
Test
315
12.9
9
24
50
6
Total
1050
–
–
–
50
6
Table 2: Dataset statistics of CareFlow .
Model
Weasis
3D Slicer
Orthanc
OpenEMR
Average
SWA
TA
SWA
TA
SWA
TA
SWA
TA
SWA
TA
Qwen 2.5 VL 7B
58.64
1.33
61.4
1.66
65.5
2.5
63.20
1.66
57.18
1.78
Qwen 3 VL 8B
65.20
1.33
68.38
3.33
67.71
5.0
66.31
5.0
66.90
3.66
Qwen2.5 VL 32B
79.95
5.13
68.00
1.90
48.62
2.42
41.60
0.32
60.72
2.43
Llama 3.2 11B
86.03
10.26
76.47
4.60
69.58
13.58
62.56
11.47
75.65
9.50
Llama 4 Scout
84.34
10.26
78.47
2.70
88.56
23.90
85.55
21.79
85.65
13.50
Table 3: Results on CareFlow . Columns group Step-Wise Accuracy (SWA) and Task Accuracy (TA) for each software; the last group reports the overall Average . Best results are bold , best among baselines are underlined . Green-highlighted rows denote our proposed method.
Figure 5: Qualitative visualization of Llama-4 Maverick-17B performing CarePilot’s radiology workflow tasks. The traces highlight typical action–mode confusions such as issuing ZOOM instead of CLICK for tool selection and CLICK in place of SEGMENT or TEXT operations. These incomplete branches illustrate the model’s inconsistent tool arming and gesture execution.
Model
SWA
TA
Qwen2.5 VL 32B
71.74
12.72
Llama 3.2 11B
70.76
16.36
Llama 4 Scout
72.20
20.75
Llama 4 Maverick
73.71
27.27
Qwen3 VL 235B
75.18
25.46
Mistral 3.2 VL 24B
69.63
1.82
Table 4: Results on OOD OpenHospital . Best is bold , best among baselines are underlined . Green rows denote our method ( CarePilot ), gray rows indicate closed-source models, and white rows represent open-source baselines.
Model
SWA
TA
CarePilot(WC)
65.37
3.75
CarePilot(WC + TG)
72.98
12.5
CarePilot (Qwen-VL 2.5-7B)
88.05
48.90
Table 5: Results to show the impact of Critic agent in CarePilot . WC represents without critic. (WC +TG) represents without critic agent but using tool grounding.
Figure 6: Variation of performance of CareFlow across different steps range.
Contextual Information
Overall
TG
LTM
STM
SWA
TA
✗
✓
✓
73.20
9.37
✓
✗
✓
82.10
23.67
✓
✓
✗
80.40
30.42
✓
✓
✓
88.05
48.90
Table 6: Ablation on contextual components using CarePilot (Qwen 2.5 VL 7B) : Tool Grounding (TG), Long-Term Memory (LTM), and Short-Term Memory (STM). Reported are overall Step-Wise Accuracy (SWA) and Task Accuracy (TA). Best results are bold , and second-best are underlined .
Contextual Information
Overall
TG
LTM
STM
SWA
TA
✗
✓
✓
75.38
11.25
✓
✗
✓
84.22
26.25
✓
✓
✗
82.53
32.50
✓
✓
✓
90.18
51.45
Table 7: Ablation on contextual components using CarePilot (Qwen 3 VL 8B) : Tool Grounding (TG), Long-Term Memory (LTM), and Short-Term Memory (STM). Reported are overall Step-Wise Accuracy (SWA) and Task Accuracy (TA). Best results are bold , and second-best are underlined .
Tool Components
Overall
OD
ZOOM
OCR
TM
SWA
TA
✗
✓
✓
✓
81.16
38.59
✓
✗
✓
✓
85.67
46.31
✓
✓
✗
✓
76.65
30.87
✓
✓
✓
✗
72.14
25.73
✓
✓
✓
✓
88.05
48.90
Table 8: Ablation on tool components using CarePilot (Qwen 2.5 VL 7B) : Object Detection (OD), Zoom (ZOOM), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and Tool Memory (TM). Reported are overall Step-Wise Accuracy (SWA) and Task Accuracy (TA). Best results are bold , and second-best are underlined .
Figure 7: Qualitative visualization of GPT-5 predictions for the same CarePilot tasks. While GPT-5 improves on low-level action consistency, it still fails under domain-shifted UI states—issuing repeated SCROLL commands or premature free-text annotations before activating the correct tool. These errors contrast with CarePilot’s complete, state-aware execution across both CT abdomen and chest workflows.
Method
Avg. Time / Task
TWA
Qwen 2.5 VL (Zero Shot)
∼ 20 s
8.5
Actor-Critic, tools
∼ 150 s
42.5
CarePilot (distilled)
∼ 90 s
48.9
Table 9: Empirical average inference time per long-horizon task on CareFlow(315 tasks).
End-to-end automation of realistic healthcare operations stresses three capabilities underrepresented in current benchmarks: policy density, decisions must be grounded in a large library of medical, insurance, and operational rules; Multi-role composition: a single task requires the agent to play multiple roles with handoffs; and multilateral interaction: intermediate workflow steps are multi-turn dialogs, such as peer-to-peer review and patient outreach. We introduce χ-Bench, a benchmark of long-horizon healthcare workflows across three domains: provider prior authorization, payer utilization management, and care management. Each task hands the agent a clinical case in a high-fidelity simulator of 20 healthcare apps exposed via 87 MCP tools, which it must drive to a terminal status through tool calls and writing the role's artifacts, guided by a 1,290+ document managed-care operations handbook skill. Across 30 agent harness/models configurations, the best agent resolves only 28.0% of tasks, no agent clears 20% on strict pass^3, and executing all tasks in a single session slumps the performance to 3.8%. These results raise the hypothesis that similar gaps are likely to surface in other policy-dense, role-composed, irreversible enterprise domains.
Haolin Chen, Deon Metelski, Leon Qi +30
Johns Hopkins Medicine · Wellstar Health System · Stanford University +16
As AI agents become increasingly capable of complex, long-horizon reasoning, rigorous and holistic evaluation is essential for measuring progress toward real-world healthcare applications. We introduce HealthAgentBench, a suite of 54 agentic healthcare tasks across 7 categories each with its unique environment. The benchmark suite spans diverse workflows throughout the patient journey and a broad range of modalities. Each task is designed to replicate an end-to-end clinical workflow: given minimal instructions, an agent must explore raw healthcare data, operate within a complex environment, and execute multi-step solutions that go beyond naive prompting. A final task success rate is reported to provide a single, interpretable metric for HealthAgentBench overall performance for each agent. Evaluating frontier agents on HealthAgentBench, we find that overall task success rate remains low, underscoring the difficulty of the suite. The strongest and the most cost effective agent, Codex GPT-5.5, achieves only approximately 42% success rate. Beyond aggregate performance, HealthAgentBench reveals nuanced strengths and weaknesses across task categories. Frontier agents show promise in automatically developing research modeling pipelines over EHR data, but medical imaging remains especially challenging, particularly for Claude Code models, while Codex GPT-5.5 shows emerging capability. Tasks that combine large search spaces with compositional reasoning requirements remain difficult for all current agents. Together, these results suggest that HealthAgentBench provides a challenging and realistic benchmark with substantial room for future progress. We release our benchmark at https://github.com/microsoft/HealthAgentBench.
Long-horizon household tasks demand robust high-level planning and sustained reasoning capabilities, which are largely overlooked by existing embodied AI benchmarks that emphasize short-horizon navigation or manipulation and rely on fixed task categories. We introduce LongAct, a benchmark designed to evaluate planning-level autonomy in long-horizon household tasks specified through free-form instructions. By abstracting away embodiment-specific low-level control, LongAct isolates high-level cognitive capabilities such as instruction understanding, dependency management, memory maintenance, and adaptive planning. We further propose HoloMind, a VLM-driven agent with a DAG-based long-horizon hierarchical planner, a Multimodal Spatial Memory for persistent world modeling, an Episodic Memory for experience reuse, and a global Critic for reflective supervision. Experiments with GPT-5 and Qwen3-VL models show that HoloMind substantially improves long-horizon performance while reducing reliance on model scale. Even top models achieve only 59% goal completion and 16% full-task success, underscoring the difficulty of LongAct and the need for stronger long-horizon planning in embodied agents.
Zilin Zhu, Longteng Guo, Yanghong Mei +5
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · Zhongguancun Academy, Beijing, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China