Magentic-UI: Towards Human-in-the-loop Agentic Systems

Description

The research paper introduces **Magentic-UI**, an open-source web interface and prototype designed for developing and studying human-in-the-loop (HIL) agentic systems. The authors argue that HIL is essential because current AI agents, despite being capable of autonomously completing complex tasks such as web browsing and software development, still lack human-level performance and pose safety risks like misalignment or adversarial manipulation. Magentic-UI, built on a flexible multi-agent architecture, provides six key interaction mechanisms to enable effective human oversight and low-cost involvement. These mechanisms include **co-planning** (human and agent collaborating on the task plan), **co-tasking** (dynamic handoffs of control during execution), **action guards** (requiring approval for high-stakes actions), **answer verification**, **multi-tasking** (running several tasks simultaneously), and **long-term memory** (saving plans for repetitive tasks). Evaluations show that integrating human feedback via simulated users can significantly boost performance, such as increasing task-completion accuracy by 71% in one test scenario. Furthermore, targeted safety testing confirmed that layered mitigations, including the action guard system and Docker sandboxing, are necessary and effective for preventing dangerous exploits like prompt injection attacks. Magentic-UI is presented as a crucial foundation for advancing reliable and safe human-agent collaboration. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22358 https://github.com/microsoft/magentic-ui