PPTArena: A Benchmark for Agentic PowerPoint Editing

TL;DR

PPTArena introduces a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating PowerPoint editing agents on real slide decks, emphasizing in-place modifications guided by natural language, and proposes a structure-aware agent that significantly outperforms existing systems.

Contribution

The paper presents PPTArena, a new benchmark for PowerPoint editing, and introduces PPTPilot, a novel structure-aware editing agent that improves editing accuracy and visual fidelity.

Findings

PPTPilot outperforms proprietary agents by over 10 percentage points.

The benchmark reveals current agents struggle with long-horizon, document-scale tasks.

PPTArena enables evaluation of in-place slide editing under natural language instructions.

Abstract

We introduce PPTArena, a benchmark for PowerPoint editing that measures reliable modifications to real slides under natural-language instructions. In contrast to image-PDF renderings or text-to-slide generation, PPTArena focuses on in-place editing across 100 decks, 2125 slides, and over 800 targeted edits covering text, charts, tables, animations, and master-level styles. Each case includes a ground-truth deck, a fully specified target outcome, and a dual VLM-as-judge pipeline that separately scores instruction following and visual quality using both structural diffs and slide images. Building on this setting, we propose PPTPilot, a structure-aware slide-editing agent that plans semantic edit sequences, routes between high-level programmatic tools and deterministic XML operations for precise control, and verifies outputs through an iterative plan-edit-check loop against task-specific constraints. In our experiments, PPTPilot outperforms strong proprietary agents and frontier VLM systems by over 10 percentage points on compound, layout-sensitive, and cross-slide edits, with particularly large gains in visual fidelity and deck-wide consistency. Despite these improvements, existing agents still underperform on long-horizon, document-scale tasks in PPTArena, highlighting the remaining challenges in reliable PPT editing.