The paper introduces KNOWS, a benchmark for evaluating web agents that act as assistants by retrieving, synthesizing, and presenting information across complex, multi-step browser tasks. It outlines a task design rubric, evaluation protocol combining deterministic checks with LLM judgments, and reports that current agents achieve only modest success, with the best performing agent succeeding on less than 3% of tasks. The study highlights significant gaps in agents’ tool use, visual understanding, and long‑horizon reasoning.
By Alexander Gill, Md Farhan Ishmam, Xuyen Nguyen, Neha Bhat, Parker Henry DeYoung, Fateme Hashemi Chaleshtori, Nathan Stringham, Kenneth Marino, Ana Marasovi\'c
RSure-Agent is a framework designed to improve remote sensing agents by verifying tool observations before they influence downstream reasoning. It introduces a verifiable observation protocol that requires tools to provide process evidence, and builds a task‑tool reliability prior from offline feedback to assess each tool configuration’s past performance. In evaluations on EarthBench, ThinkGeo, TerraLogic, and CHOICE‑420, RSure-Agent cuts error propagation by 21.3–25.9 percentage points and boosts overall accuracy, while also reducing the number of tool calls.
By Fuyuan Liu, Nayu Liu, Wenhao Yu, Peijin Wang, Yingchao Feng, Fanglong Yao, Yue Zhou, Xue Yang, Chao Ren, Liang Wan, Wei Feng
The paper introduces the Necessary Tool‑Evidence Path (NTEP) annotation scheme and its associated reward mechanism (NTEP‑R) to better supervise vision‑language models that use external tools. By explicitly specifying which evidence is needed and penalizing redundant tool calls, the authors train an 8B‑parameter model that shows improved accuracy and tool‑use efficiency across seven image‑grounded benchmarks. The approach demonstrates that fine‑grained supervision of tool‑evidence paths is essential for robust agentic VLM performance.
By Xingming Long, Yu Liu, Zhiwei Yang, Hanqi Feng, Shaojie Zhang, Barnabas Poczos, Chao Jiang, Zhenbo Luo, Lei Jiang, Pei Fu
OSWorld-Science is a benchmark and evaluation environment for computer-using agents that use visual language models (VLMs) to perform scientific software tasks. It includes 12 VLMs and 146 high-quality tasks across domains such as molecular drawing, pathology image analysis, statistical computing, and physical simulation, with artifact-based evaluation and a harness that logs interactions and supports model comparison. The benchmark was developed through expert proposals and iterative human–AI co‑design, and results show that current VLMs still struggle with key scientific questions, offering insights into factors like language, reasoning, and context length.
By Dingyuan Dai, Heli Qi, Lei Liu, Yinxi Li, Baiding Chen, Zijun Dou, Qingcheng Zeng, Qi Kang, Oliver Sun, Eric Wang, Bo Zhou, Haixin Wang, Yufan Du, Shi Bo, Ruihan Lin, Mengqi Yuan, Dunjie Lu, Steven Dillmann, Yiming Shi, Tina Su, Amy Xin, Minghao Liu, Xi Wang, Xu Huang, Ge Zhang, Pengyu Nie, Zhen Yang, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li, Weihao Xuan, Tianyu Liu
MatToolBench is a new benchmark that evaluates multimodal GUI agents on professional materials science software. It contains 204 tasks across 10 tools in three modalities—GUI operation, OriginPro scripting, and code-based database queries—executed inside a Windows 11 VM. The benchmark offers fine-grained, expert-decomposed scoring and a high-performing multimodal judge for aesthetic assessment, revealing that strong general benchmark performance does not transfer to scientific workflows.
By Mei Wu, Rui Xie, Runyu Zhang, Yuqiang Li, Tianfan Fu, Bo Chen, Kai Yu, Xin Chen, Lu Chen
arXiv:2609.24094v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Visual analytics (VA) enables sensemaking through interactive visualization, but effective analysis often requires experts to translate high-level in...
By Yutong Chen, Zhike Tang, Zhihao Mai, Zhihao Shuai, Danli Luo, Jing Xu, Weikai Yang
arXiv:2609.24362v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Sandboxed computer environments support multi-step reasoning with tools, executable programs, and persistent files, yet their extension from language m...
By Hexiong Yang, Mingrui Chen, Jie Cao, Ran He
arXiv:2603. 29139v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled agentic systems to translate natural-language intent into executable scientific visualization (SciVis) tasks.
By Kuangshi Ai, Haichao Miao, Kaiyuan Tang, Nathaniel Gorski, Jianxin Sun, Guoxi Liu, Helgi I. Ingolfsson, David Lenz, Hanqi Guo, Hongfeng Yu, Teja Leburu, Michael Molash, Bei Wang, Tom Peterka, Chaoli Wang, Shusen Liu
VTOS (Vision Tools Orchestration Search) is a framework that adaptively orchestrates vision foundation tools—such as open‑vocabulary detectors, segmentation models, and post‑processing operators—by jointly searching for executable solution programs and observer programs that diagnose failures and provide feedback. The observer programs feed observations into a shared VisionThoughts knowledge base, guiding subsequent searches. In two case studies—dense object counting on LVIS‑Count and zero‑shot plant‑disease segmentation on PlantSeg‑OOD—VTOS outperforms static tool pipelines and agentic visual‑programming baselines, especially in complex scenarios like dense, occluded scenes and out‑of‑distribution segmentation.
By Jinchao Ge, Lingqiao Liu, Shuwen Zhao, Lei Wang
arXiv:2608.28590v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown promise for automating data-science workflows, yet their end-to-end performance depends critically on the...
By Fan Liu, Hao Liu
AgentHorizon is a benchmark comprising 1,373 computer‑use tasks with instruction‑trajectory pairs collected from 166 hours of human‑recorded activity across three operating systems. The benchmark uses a paired design that swaps instructions to create negative tasks, testing judges’ ability to distinguish successful trajectories from those that completed a similar but incompatible request. Eleven judges were evaluated, with GPT‑5.5 achieving the highest balanced accuracy of 80.9% on the full trajectory subset, while tool‑use benefits some models but harms others, revealing large variability in judges’ performance.
By Xing Han L\`u, Dheeraj Vattikonda, Sina Hajimiri, Fatemeh Pesaran Zadeh, Parishad BehnamGhader, Ghazwa Darwiche, Amirhossein Kazemnejad, Christopher Pal, Alexandre Drouin, Siva Reddy
arXiv:2609.40325v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: As interactive 3D worlds are increasingly used to study intelligent behavior, it becomes important to develop efficient pipelines for identifying anoma...
By Ziyan Jiang, Jingbo Yang, Jiabao Ji, Yujian Liu, Qiucheng Wu, Tommi Jaakkola, Yang Zhang, Shiyu Chang