pointerbench-text/README.md

# Pointerbench-Text

**A 500-example GUI grounding benchmark for text.** Given a screenshot of a
text-rich interface and a short instruction (e.g. *"Click the word 'invoice'"*,
*"Place the cursor between the 'r' and 'e' in 'erfolgreich'"*, *"Return the
bounding box of this paragraph"*), a model must output either a pixel coordinate
or a bounding box. Point answers are correct if they land inside the target box.
Bbox answers use an asymmetric overlap rule: the ground truth must be almost
fully covered while the prediction stays reasonably tight around it (see
[Evaluation](#evaluate)).

![teaser](assets/teaser.png)

## Why text?

General GUI-grounding suites (ScreenSpot, ScreenSpot-v2, ScreenSpot-Pro) target
icons, buttons, and widgets, but they barely test **pointing inside running
text**: a specific word among hundreds of near-identical ones, a single
character, a punctuation mark, or a caret position between two letters.
That precision is exactly what cursor-based editing, proofreading, and
text-selection agents need. Pointerbench-Text isolates it across many real text
surfaces and five languages.

## What's inside

- **500** examples, one instruction per image.
- **1024x768** PNG screenshots, fully synthetic (no scraping, no PII).
- **Many text surfaces**: articles, books, email inbox and threads, chat,
  Slack, code editors, terminals, markdown notes, docs sites, forums, social
  feeds, search results, data tables, log viewers, invoices, and dozens more
  (119 distinct surfaces).
- **7 data types** (interaction granularity):

  | data_type     | example instruction                                  |
  | ------------- | ---------------------------------------------------- |
  | `word`        | *Click the word "invoice".*                          |
  | `char`        | *Click the second "e" in "settlement".*              |
  | `punctuation` | *Click the period after "done".*                     |
  | `caret`       | *Place the cursor between the "r" and "e" in "core".* |
  | `chrome`      | *Click "Settings" in the toolbar.*                   |
  | `bbox`        | *Return the bbox of the paragraph beginning with "In".* |
  | `invoice`     | *Draw a box around the subtotal.*                    |

- **Fine-grained categories** under those types (word center, char center,
  punctuation, caret before/after/between, between words, line start/end,
  sentence boundary, paragraph start/end, blank line, chrome label, word bbox,
  char bbox, line bbox, paragraph bbox).
- **Invoice fields** (70 examples): bounding boxes for real invoice anatomy:
  invoice number, dates, sender/recipient blocks, line items and the full
  line-item table, subtotal, tax / VAT ID, total, IBAN/BIC, and bank details.
  These are dedicated invoice surfaces so the target is unambiguous.
- **5 languages, Latin alphabet only**: 50% English; the other 50% split evenly
  across German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch.
- **Difficulty** tag (`easy` / `medium` / `hard`) from font size, target kind,
  and theme contrast.
- Randomized realism: 20 font families, mixed sizes, per-span color / bold /
  italic / underline / highlight / link / code / strike / faded styling, light
  and dark themes, plus film grain, JPEG artifacts, and fake caret / cursor
  distractors.

## Schema

Each line of `data/test/metadata.jsonl` (HuggingFace `imagefolder` layout):

```json
{
  "file_name": "0000.png",
  "id": "pbt_0000",
  "instruction": "Click the word \"invoice\".",
  "bbox": [596, 376, 681, 395],
  "point": [638, 385],
  "answer_type": "point",
  "eval": {"type": "point_in_bbox", "bbox": [596, 376, 681, 395]},
  "data_type": "word",
  "category": "word_center",
  "surface": "email_thread",
  "language": "en",
  "difficulty": "medium",
  "image_size": [1024, 768]
}
```

- **`bbox`**: ground-truth target, **`[x1, y1, x2, y2]` in absolute pixels**
  (top-left, bottom-right) on the 1024x768 image. For point rows, a prediction
  is correct iff it lands inside this box. For bbox rows, the prediction is
  scored against this box with the asymmetric coverage/precision rule (see
  [Evaluation](#evaluate)).
- **`point`**: a reference click point inside the box.
- **`answer_type`**: `point` or `bbox`.
- **`eval`**: binary evaluation rule for this row.
- **`data_type`**: coarse interaction granularity (see table above).
- **`category`**: the fine-grained target kind.
- **`surface`**: the rendered surface (app/document skin).
- **`language`**: instruction language (`en`, `de`, `fr`, `es`, `it`, `nl`).
- **`difficulty`**: `easy` / `medium` / `hard`.

## Quickstart

### Load the data

Via HuggingFace `datasets`:

```python
from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("WarmwindOS/pointerbench", data_dir="pointerbench-text", split="test")
ex = ds[0]
ex["image"]        # PIL.Image, 1024x768
ex["instruction"]  # "Click the word \"invoice\"."
ex["bbox"]         # [x1, y1, x2, y2]
```

Or locally with the imagefolder loader:

```python
from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("imagefolder", data_dir="data", split="test")
```

Or with no dependencies at all, read `data/test/metadata.jsonl` and open the
sibling PNGs yourself.

### Evaluate

1. Print the recommended system prompt with `python eval.py --show-system-prompt`,
   or edit it for your inference stack while keeping the 1024x768 coordinate
   frame fixed.
2. Run your model on every example's `instruction` + image and collect a
   predicted click point or bbox (absolute pixels on the 1024x768 image).
3. Write predictions as JSONL, one object per example:

   ```json
   {"id": "pbt_0000", "point": [612, 388]}
   {"id": "pbt_0001", "bbox": [193, 643, 807, 688]}
   ```

4. Score (pure standard library, no dependencies):

   ```bash
   python eval.py --predictions preds.jsonl
   ```

   ```
   Pointerbench-Text: 500 examples
   ============================================
   Accuracy: 64.20%   (321/500)

   By data type:
     caret               48.81%   (n=168)
     char                55.56%   (n=18)
     ...
   ```

The scorer reports overall accuracy plus per-data-type, per-category,
per-surface, per-language, and per-difficulty breakdowns. `--json report.json`
writes the full report.

**Bbox scoring rule.** Point rows use point-in-bbox. Bbox rows (text bounding
boxes and invoice fields) use an asymmetric overlap rule instead of plain IoU: a
hit requires `coverage >= 0.90` (share of the ground-truth area inside the
prediction) **and** `precision >= 0.70` (share of the prediction inside the
ground truth). Cutting off part of the target is penalised far more than
wrapping it with some margin, which matches what text-grounding actually needs.
The thresholds are configurable per row via `eval.min_coverage` /
`eval.min_precision`.

### Turning model output into a point

Models emit clicks in many shapes; map them to `[x, y]` pixels before scoring.
For example, a `<click>x,y</click>` tag or a normalized `0-1` / `0-999` point:

```python
import re
def to_point(text, w=1024, h=768):
    m = re.search(r"(-?\d+(?:\.\d+)?)\s*[,\s]\s*(-?\d+(?:\.\d+)?)", text)
    x, y = float(m.group(1)), float(m.group(2))
    if max(x, y) <= 1.0:   x, y = x * w, y * h          # normalized 0-1
    elif max(x, y) <= 999: x, y = x / 999 * w, y / 999 * h  # 0-999 grid
    return [round(x), round(y)]
```

## Baselines

| Model                         | Accuracy | Notes                     |
| ----------------------------- | -------- | ------------------------- |
| Center-click (512, 384)       | low      | sanity floor              |
| _your model here_             | n/a      | open a PR                 |

## Construction and reproducibility

Examples are rendered programmatically (pure PIL, no browser, no real files), so
every ground-truth box is pixel-exact: the layout engine records per-glyph
geometry and an independent verifier confirms each instruction resolves to
exactly one target before the example is kept. The set is **held out**: it is
built with a generation seed disjoint from any training data, so no benchmark
page is reused for training. The generator and the exact build command live in
the [source repo](https://github.com/warmwindOS/pointerbench); see
[`REPRODUCE.md`](REPRODUCE.md).

## Limitations

- Fully synthetic: realistic but not screenshots of real applications.
- Fixed 1024x768 resolution; Latin-script languages only.
- Non-English instructions reference targets by quoted word or chrome label;
  the fine-grained caret/char/punctuation categories are English and German.
- Targets are words, characters, punctuation, caret positions, and chrome
  labels, and text bboxes, not icons, images, or widgets.

## Citation

```bibtex
@misc{pointerbench_text_2026,
  title  = {Pointerbench-Text: A GUI Grounding Benchmark for Text},
  author = {Maximilian Schilling and Warmwind AG},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://github.com/warmwindOS/pointerbench}
}
```

## License

- **Data** (images + annotations): [CC BY 4.0](LICENSE).
- **Code** (`eval.py`): MIT.