Kolab: Benchmarking Human-Agent Collaboration in Long-Horizon Workflows

Shirley Anugrah Hayati, Patricia Anugrah Setiani, Ruizi Wang, Zhouyi Li, Khanh Chi Le +2

When humans collaborate with AI agents on long-horizon tasks, what happens to the agents' contributions? For solving long-horizon tasks, humans place greater importance on ongoing interaction with AI agents (e.g., revising plans) than on an agent's ability to complete the task in a single attempt. However, most agentic benchmarks have focused more on automation. Strong performance on such benchmarks does not imply effective real-world collaboration. Professional workflows offer a useful setting, as they often involve interdependent steps. To address this gap, we introduce Kolab, a new dataset of 115+ hours of screen recordings of 50 professionals from 40 occupations collaborating with agents on realistic, long-horizon problems. Kolab also contains participants' collaboration and output quality judgments. Our analysis reveals diverse collaboration patterns, highlighting the importance of when and how professionals coordinate with agents. A collaborative agent must do two things that automation benchmarks never test: anticipate whether experts will adopt, modify, or reject its contribution once it leaves the chat window to guide its next steps, and assess collaboration quality from…