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