Microsoft's Sico-Evolution Beats GPT-5.4 at GUI Tasks With a Tiny 4B Open Model

Microsoft's Sico-Evolution doubles task success rate to 82.9% on a 4B model, beating GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.7 on Edge and Copilot UI tasks

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Microsoft's Sico-Evolution Beats GPT-5.4 at GUI Tasks With a Tiny 4B Open ModelPRO
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TypeModel
SubtopicComputer Use
  • 82.9% Task Success Rate: Microsoft's Sico-Evolution jumps +43.1 points from its 39.8% baseline on Edge and Copilot UI tasks.
  • Beats proprietary giants: Outperforms GPT-5.4 (79.7%), Claude Opus 4.6 (81.3%), and Claude Opus 4.7 (82.1%) at just 4B parameters.
  • LoRA fine-tune on real trajectories: Built on GELab-Zero-4B-preview (Qwen3-VL-4B) using Microsoft Edge and Copilot UI interaction data.
  • Iterative evolution pipeline: Project Sico uses a round-by-round improvement loop designed to transfer to any GUI app.
  • Fully open-source: Available now on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0, compatible with Transformers, vLLM, and SGLang.
  • First of more to come: Microsoft describes this as the first public release from the Sico evolution pipeline, with additional evolved models planned.

GUI agents -- AI systems that can look at a screen and autonomously click, type, and navigate software -- have been a frontier mostly dominated by large, expensive proprietary models. Microsoft just flipped that script. The team behind Project Sico released GELab-Zero-4B-preview-Sico-Evolution, a 4-billion-parameter GUI agent that outperforms GPT-5.4, Claude Opus 4.6, and Claude Opus 4.7 on real Microsoft Edge and Copilot UI tasks -- all while being fully open-source under Apache 2.0.

From 39.8% to 82.9% in one pipeline

Sico-Evolution achieves a dominant 82.9% Task Success Rate, a massive +43.1% absolute surge over the 39.8% base-model baseline. To put that in perspective, it edges out top proprietary giants like GPT-5.4 (79.7%), Claude Opus 4.6 (81.3%), and Claude Opus 4.7 (82.1%). It also vastly exceeds leading open-source competitors including kimi-k2.6 (62.6%) and UI-Venus-1.5-30B (61.0%).

The benchmark here is Task Success Rate (TSR) on real Edge and Copilot UI trajectories -- meaning the agent is scored on whether it actually completes a task end-to-end, not just whether individual clicks look right. That's a much harder bar than static localization benchmarks, and it's the one that matters for real deployments.

What's actually powering this jump

Sico-Evolution is a 4B GUI agent fine-tuned with LoRA from the open-source GELab-Zero-4B-preview base model on Microsoft Edge and Copilot UI trajectories, built with a general-purpose GUI model evolution pipeline -- an iterative mechanism that keeps lifting an agent's real task success rate round after round, and transfers to any GUI app.

The base model itself, GELab-Zero-4B-preview, is built on Qwen3-VL-4B and was developed by StepFun's GELab team. It already had strong GUI fundamentals: GELab-Zero-4B-preview achieves 75.86% success rate on AndroidWorld testing, demonstrating excellent performance on complex mobile tasks. Microsoft's Sico pipeline then takes that foundation and evolves it specifically for Windows-native UI environments.

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