mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

OSWorld-MCP: Benchmarking MCP Tool Invocation In Computer-Use Agents

arXiv 2510.24563 ↗First posted 28 Oct 2025cs.CVcited by 25

On the map: LLM reasoning → Reasoning for agents, planning and code

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

With advances in decision-making and reasoning capabilities, multimodal agents show strong potential in computer application scenarios. Past evaluations have mainly assessed GUI interaction skills, while tool invocation abilities, such as those enabled by the Model Context Protocol (MCP), have been largely overlooked. Comparing agents with integrated tool invocation to those evaluated only on GUI interaction is inherently unfair. We present OSWorld-MCP, the first comprehensive and fair benchmark for assessing computer-use agents' tool invocation, GUI operation, and decision-making abilities in a real-world environment. We design a novel automated code-generation pipeline to create tools and combine them with a curated selection from existing tools. Rigorous manual validation yields 158 high-quality tools (covering 7 common applications), each verified for correct functionality, practical applicability, and versatility. Extensive evaluations of state-of-the-art multimodal agents on OSWorld-MCP show that MCP tools generally improve task success rates (e.g., from 8.3% to 20.4% for OpenAI o3 at 15 steps, from 40.1% to 43.3% for Claude 4 Sonnet at 50 steps), underscoring the importance of assessing tool invocation capabilities. However, even the strongest models have relatively low tool invocation rates, Only 36.3%, indicating room for improvement and highlighting the benchmark's challenge. By explicitly measuring MCP tool usage skills, OSWorld-MCP deepens understanding of multimodal agents and sets a new standard for evaluating performance in complex, tool-assisted environments. Our code, environment, and data are publicly available at https://osworld-mcp.github.io.

Key facts. Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 32 of its 41 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Oct 2025.

Builds on

32 of 41 references.

References · 32

  1. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,195
  2. 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,146
  3. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,418
  4. 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,655
  5. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 1,908
  6. 2025InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Modelscited by 1,769
  7. 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Webcited by 1,210
  8. 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,134
  9. 2025UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agentscited by 584
  10. 2024AndroidWorld: A Dynamic Benchmarking Environment for Autonomous Agentscited by 450
  11. 2025Seed1.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 367
  12. 2024WorkArena: How Capable Are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?cited by 348
20 more
  1. 2024Mobile-Agent: Autonomous Multi-Modal Mobile Device Agent with Visual Perceptioncited by 283
  2. 2025GUI-R1 : A Generalist R1-Style Vision-Language Action Model For GUI Agentscited by 240
  3. 2024Windows Agent Arena: Evaluating Multi-Modal OS Agents at Scalecited by 212
  4. 2024Mobile-Agent-v2: Mobile Device Operation Assistant with Effective Navigation via Multi-Agent Collaborationcited by 187
  5. 2025Mobile-Agent-v3: Fundamental Agents for GUI Automationcited by 183
  6. 2024WebLINX: Real-World Website Navigation with Multi-Turn Dialoguecited by 177
  7. 2025UI-R1: Enhancing Efficient Action Prediction of GUI Agents by Reinforcement Learningcited by 166
  8. 2024OmniACT: A Dataset and Benchmark for Enabling Multimodal Generalist Autonomous Agents for Desktop and Webcited by 156
  9. 2025Mobile-Agent-E: Self-Evolving Mobile Assistant for Complex Taskscited by 128
  10. 2025OS-Harm: A Benchmark for Measuring Safety of Computer Use Agentscited by 104
  11. 2025MCP-Bench: Benchmarking Tool-Using LLM Agents with Complex Real-World Tasks via MCP Serverscited by 101
  12. 2025A survey of agent interoperability protocols: Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent Communication Protocol (ACP), Agent-to-Agent Protocol (A2A), and Agent Network Protocol (ANP)cited by 98
  13. 2024MMInA: Benchmarking Multihop Multimodal Internet Agentscited by 55
  14. 2025ComputerRL: Scaling End-to-End Online Reinforcement Learning for Computer Use Agentscited by 49
  15. 2025MCP-RADAR: A Multi-Dimensional Benchmark for Evaluating Tool Use Capabilities in Large Language Modelscited by 48
  16. 2025LiveMCPBench: Can Agents Navigate an Ocean of MCP Tools?cited by 47
  17. 2025OSWorld-Human: Benchmarking the Efficiency of Computer-Use Agentscited by 37
  18. 2025MCPEval: Automatic MCP-based Deep Evaluation for AI Agent Modelscited by 34
  19. 2025CoAct-1: Computer-using Multi-Agent System with Coding Actionscited by 33
  20. 2025UI-S1: Advancing GUI Automation via Semi-online Reinforcement Learningcited by 32

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 2; 2026: 23.

25 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2026Mobile-Agent-v3.5: Multi-platform Fundamental GUI Agentscited by 72
  2. 2025MobileWorld: Benchmarking Autonomous Mobile Agents in Agent-User Interactive and MCP-Augmented Environmentscited by 69
  3. 2026OSWorld 2.0: Benchmarking Computer Use Agents on Long-Horizon Real-World Taskscited by 29
  4. 2026ToolCUA: Towards Optimal GUI-Tool Path Orchestration for Computer Use Agentscited by 10
  5. 2026From Question Answering to Task Completion: A Survey on Agent System and Harness Designcited by 9
  6. 2026Agentic Environment Engineering for Large Language Models: A Survey of Environment Modeling, Synthesis, Evaluation, and Applicationcited by 8
  7. 2026Visual Confused Deputy: Exploiting and Defending Perception Failures in Computer-Using Agentscited by 7
  8. 2026TUA-Bench: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Terminal-Use Agentscited by 7
  9. 2026DeskCraft: Benchmarking Desktop Agents on Professional Workflows and Human-in-the-Loop Collaborationcited by 4
  10. 2026PhoneBuddy: Training Open Models for Agentic Phone Usecited by 4
  11. 2026EE-MCP: Self-Evolving MCP-GUI Agents via Automated Environment Generation and Experience Learningcited by 3
  12. 2026GUI Agents with Reinforcement Learning: Toward Digital Inhabitantscited by 3
13 more
  1. 2026MedMCP-Calc: Benchmarking LLMs for Realistic Medical Calculator Scenarios via MCP Integrationcited by 2
  2. 2026MCP-Persona: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Real-World Personal Applications via Environment Simulationcited by 2
  3. 2026MM-ToolSandBox: A Unified Framework for Evaluating Visual Tool-Calling Agentscited by 2
  4. 2026Beyond Simply Environment Scaling: Designing Effective Environment Distributions for Multimodal Agent Learningcited by 2
  5. 2026CUA-Universe: A Scalable and Dynamic Environment for Hybrid GUI+CLI Agentscited by 1
  6. 2025Training One Model to Master Cross-Level Agentic Actions via Reinforcement Learningcited by 0
  7. 2026TOBench: A Task-Oriented Omni-Modal Benchmark for Real-World Tool-Using Agentscited by 0
  8. 2026DynamicMCPBench: A Trace-Grounded, Effect-Scored Benchmark for LLM Agents over Live MCP Serverscited by 0
  9. 2026Improving Proficiency and Efficiency of Android GUI Agents via Self-Generating Tool Actionscited by 0
  10. 2026MintAct: A Unified Visual Agent for Digital Environmentscited by 0
  11. 2026The Hard Part Comes After Search: Benchmarking Web Agents on Synthesizing, Organizing, and Displaying Knowledgecited by 0
  12. 2026HybridCUA: Learning to Orchestrate GUI and CLI for Computer-Use Agentscited by 0
  13. 2026OSWorld-Science: A Benchmark of Computer Use Agents for Learning and Using Scientific Softwarecited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025MCP-AgentBench: Evaluating Real-World Language Agent Performance with MCP-Mediated Tools
  2. 2025MCPAgentBench: A Real-world Task Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Agent MCP Tool Use
  3. 2026OSWorld-Pro: Process-based Evaluation for Computer Use Agents
  4. 2026WindowsWorld: A Process-Centric Benchmark of Autonomous GUI Agents in Professional Cross-Application Environments
  5. 2026MCP-Atlas: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Tool-Use Competency with Real MCP Servers
  6. 2026Screenshots or Tools? Eliciting Tool Use and Managing Multimodal Context in Hybrid GUI-MCP Computer-Use Agents
  7. 2026MacAgentBench: Benchmarking AI Agents on Real-World macOS Desktop
  8. 2026Model Context Protocol (MCP) Tool Descriptions Are Smelly! Towards Improving AI Agent Efficiency with Augmented MCP Tool Descriptions