PPTArena: A Benchmark for PowerPoint Editing

Abstract

We introduce PPTArena, a benchmark for PowerPoint editing that evaluates how agents modify real slides from natural-language instructions. Unlike benchmarks that rely on image-PDF renderings or text-to-slide generation, PPTArena features 100 decks with over 1,300 human-curated edits across 2,125 slides, spanning text, charts, animations, and professional master styles. Each edit pairs a ground-truth deck with a target rubric and is scored by two Vision-Language Model (VLM) judges: one rates instruction following from structural diffs, the other visual quality from slide images. On top of this benchmark, we present PPTPilot, a structure-aware agent that plans semantic edit sequences, routes between programmatic tools and deterministic XML operations, and verifies each result in an iterative plan-edit-check loop. PPTPilot outperforms strong VLM-based agents by more than 10 percentage points on compound, layout-sensitive, and cross-slide edits, with large gains in visual fidelity and deck-wide consistency. Despite this, all agents still struggle on long-horizon, document-scale tasks, underscoring how hard reliable PowerPoint editing remains. We publicly release our code at https://github.com/michaelofengend/PPTArena .