mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

MM-ToolSandBox: A Unified Framework for Evaluating Visual Tool-Calling Agents

arXiv 2607.11818 ↗First posted 13 Jul 2026cs.CV cs.AIcited by 2

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Multimodal and embodied agents

Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce MM-ToolSandBox, a benchmark and evaluation framework for visually grounded tool-calling agents. The framework provides a stateful execution environment spanning 500+ tools across 16 application domains, supporting multi-image, multi-turn tasks where agents must ground progressively arriving visual inputs into executable tool calls while handling realistic conversational phenomena (goal revisions, error corrections, state mutations). An automated scenario generation pipeline produces diverse, visually grounded scenarios through information-flow-guided planning and multi-stage quality filtering, yielding 258 human-verified nominal scenarios and 50 variants targeting interactive UI applications. Evaluating 12 state-of-the-art models, from 4B open-weight to frontier proprietary systems, shows that current models still lack robust visual tool-calling capability: even the best model achieves below 50% success rate. Our failure analysis further reveals that visual precision, not only planning, is a primary bottleneck for capable models: 53% of failures stem from incorrect information extraction from images despite otherwise correct task workflows. A planning-to-precision crossover emerges with scale: smaller models fail at deciding what to do, while larger models fail at perceiving what they see, suggesting fundamentally different research directions for improving models at different capability levels. The framework and the benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/apple/ml-mmtoolsandbox

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal and embodied agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 32 of its 69 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Jul 2026.

Builds on

32 of 69 references.

Closest ancestors · 4

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025SO-Bench: A Structural Output Evaluation of Multimodal LLMs23 Nov
  2. 2025TIR-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Agentic Thinking-with-Images Reasoning3 Nov
  3. 2025MM-BrowseComp: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Browsing Agents14 Aug
  4. 2025Agent-X: Evaluating Deep Multimodal Reasoning in Vision-Centric Agentic Tasks30 May

Other references · 28

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  2. 2020DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Imagescited by 1,288
  3. 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,134
  4. 2023API-Bank: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Tool-Augmented LLMscited by 574
  5. 2025τ2-Bench: Evaluating Conversational Agents in a Dual-Control Environmentcited by 558
  6. 2024Executable Code Actions Elicit Better LLM Agentscited by 537
  7. 2024AndroidWorld: A Dynamic Benchmarking Environment for Autonomous Agentscited by 450
  8. 2025GLM-4.5V and GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learningcited by 439
  9. 2024WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Modelscited by 424
  10. 2024AppWorld: A Controllable World of Apps and People for Benchmarking Interactive Coding Agentscited by 359
  11. 2024ToolSandbox: A Stateful, Conversational, Interactive Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Tool Use Capabilitiescited by 272
  12. 2025ScreenSpot-Pro: GUI Grounding for Professional High-Resolution Computer Usecited by 246
16 more
  1. 2025UI-TARS-2 Technical Report: Advancing GUI Agent with Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learningcited by 205
  2. 2025ChartQAPro: A More Diverse and Challenging Benchmark for Chart Question Answeringcited by 105
  3. 2024MMSearch: Benchmarking the Potential of Large Models as Multi-modal Search Enginescited by 98
  4. 2024GTA: A Benchmark for General Tool Agentscited by 77
  5. 2025The Tool Decathlon: Benchmarking Language Agents for Diverse, Realistic, and Long-Horizon Task Executioncited by 73
  6. 2025MobileWorld: Benchmarking Autonomous Mobile Agents in Agent-User Interactive and MCP-Augmented Environmentscited by 69
  7. 2024Ferret-UI 2: Mastering Universal User Interface Understanding Across Platformscited by 51
  8. 2026MCP-Atlas: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Tool-Use Competency with Real MCP Serverscited by 46
  9. 2025Beyond Seeing: Evaluating Multimodal LLMs on Tool-Enabled Image Perception, Transformation, and Reasoningcited by 28
  10. 2026Gaia2: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Dynamic and Asynchronous Environmentscited by 28
  11. 2025OSWorld-MCP: Benchmarking MCP Tool Invocation In Computer-Use Agentscited by 25
  12. 2023ICDAR 2023 Competition on Hierarchical Text Detection and Recognitioncited by 23
  13. 2026AgentVista: Evaluating Multimodal Agents in Ultra-Challenging Realistic Visual Scenarioscited by 22
  14. 2025Ferret-UI Lite: Lessons from Building Small On-Device GUI Agentscited by 14
  15. 2026ASTRA-bench: Evaluating Tool-Use Agent Reasoning and Action Planning with Personal User Contextcited by 14
  16. 2026WorldVQA: Measuring Atomic World Knowledge in Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 5

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026VisualLeakBench: Reproducible Action-Boundary Propagation Failures in Vision-Language Agents
  2. 2026Do Multimodal Agents Really Benefit from Tool Use? A Systematic Study of Capability Gains
  3. 2026TOBench: A Task-Oriented Omni-Modal Benchmark for Real-World Tool-Using Agents
  4. 2026CUAAudit: Meta-Evaluation of Vision-Language Models as Auditors of Autonomous Computer-Use Agents
  5. 2026MMSkills: Towards Multimodal Skills for General Visual Agents
  6. 2026Beacon: Knowing When and How to Perform Agentic Visual Reasoning
  7. 2026Diversity Over Frequency: Rethinking Tool Use in Visual Chain-of-Thought Agents
  8. 2025ToolScope: An Agentic Framework for Vision-Guided and Long-Horizon Tool Use