# Tactile: Giving Computer-Using Agents Hands and Feet

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14443 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14443/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in GUI and mobile agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 8 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [GUI and mobile agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/gui-and-mobile-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06070/) (2023)
- [SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10935/) (2024)
- [GPT-4V(ision) is a Generalist Web Agent, if Grounded](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01614/) (2024)
- [WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13919/) (2024)
- [OmniParser for Pure Vision Based GUI Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00203/) (2024)
- [ScreenAgent: A Vision Language Model-driven Computer Control Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07945/) (2024)
- [macOSWorld: A Multilingual Interactive Benchmark for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04135/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Irregular Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11834/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Computer-use agents are becoming capable software operators, but their interface to desktop applications is still often a brittle motor layer: they look at screenshots, predict coordinates, click, and hope that the visible state changed as intended. This collapses target grounding, action execution, and outcome verification into a single ambiguous operation. We present Tactile, an open-source tool layer that gives agents a more reliable "hands and feet" for desktop use. Tactile converts heterogeneous UI evidence--operating-system accessibility semantics, OCR-grounded text, and visual fallback regions--into action-grounded interface states: compact target candidates with source labels, roles or text, state, geometry, executable affordances, and verification cues. Agents operate through an observe-ground-act-verify loop that prefers native semantic actions when available, falls back to OCR-grounded coordinates when visible text is the best evidence, and keeps full provenance for replay and failure attribution. On macOSWorld-style tasks, adding Tactile improves Codex Success@100 from 41.1% to 50.0% overall and from 45.2% to 55.3% on accessibility-adapted tasks; a 96-task cross-agent subset shows consistent gains across Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode, and Goose. These results suggest that reliable computer use requires not only stronger models, but also a reusable execution substrate that exposes software actions as semantic, verifiable, and auditable objects rather than anonymous screen coordinates.