mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

AppWorld-UL: Benchmarking Diverse Agent-User Interactions for Tool-Use

arXiv 2607.20536 ↗First posted 10 Jul 2026cs.AI cs.CL cs.LGcited by 2

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → GUI and mobile agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Tool-use agents that address day-to-day digital tasks such as ordering groceries must not only operate applications, but also interact with the user, e.g., to ask clarification questions, prompt for confirmation, and inform the user when the instruction is infeasible. However, current benchmarks for evaluating agent-user interactions do not capture the diversity of such interactions. Further, they operate in small environments with few, often non-state-changing, APIs. To address this gap, we introduce AppWorld-UL, a ``user-in-the-loop'' benchmark of 516 challenging tasks requiring diverse agent-user interactions. Building upon the AppWorld framework with 9 popular simulated apps like Amazon and Spotify, we systematically modify original tasks to introduce ambiguities and constraints that necessitate various types of agent-user interaction. User behavior is simulated by an LLM prompted to respond with carefully designed knowledge boundaries, offering more reliable simulation than the unconstrained or overly rigid alternatives used in prior work. Our evaluation reveals that a state-of-the-art LLM, Claude Opus 4.7, achieves only 48.6% success on AppWorld-UL, and only 35.7% on the harder, compositional subset. On the stricter, scenario-level metric, compositional task performance drops to only 21.3%. Our analysis reveals that correct user-interaction is crucial for success. This demonstrates the benchmark's difficulty and its potential to advance research on user-in-the-loop tool-use agents.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in GUI and mobile agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 17 of its 31 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 2026.

Builds on

17 of 31 references.

References · 17

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  2. 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,193
  3. 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,280
  4. 2025τ2-Bench: Evaluating Conversational Agents in a Dual-Control Environmentcited by 558
  5. 2026Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfacescited by 515
  6. 2024AppWorld: A Controllable World of Apps and People for Benchmarking Interactive Coding Agentscited by 359
  7. 2024ToolSandbox: A Stateful, Conversational, Interactive Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Tool Use Capabilitiescited by 272
  8. 2025SWEET-RL: Training Multi-Turn LLM Agents on Collaborative Reasoning Taskscited by 108
  9. 2022Reading Between the Lines: Modeling User Behavior and Costs in AI-Assisted Programmingcited by 91
  10. 2023Bridging the Gulf of Envisioning: Cognitive Design Challenges in LLM Interfacescited by 71
  11. 2025UserBench: An Interactive Gym Environment for User-Centric Agentscited by 69
  12. 2025Interactive Debugging and Steering of Multi-Agent AI Systemscited by 68
5 more
  1. 2025Plan-Then-Execute: An Empirical Study of User Trust and Team Performance When Using LLM Agents As A Daily Assistantcited by 54
  2. 2026Lost in Simulation: LLM-Simulated Users are Unreliable Proxies for Human Users in Agentic Evaluationscited by 36
  3. 2024Sketch2Code: Evaluating Vision-Language Models for Interactive Web Design Prototypingcited by 29
  4. 2023User Interaction Patterns and Breakdowns in Conversing with LLM-Powered Voice Assistantscited by 14
  5. 2024Investigating Interaction Modes and User Agency in Human-LLM Collaboration for Domain-Specific Data Analysiscited by 12

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

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  1. 2025MobileWorld: Benchmarking Autonomous Mobile Agents in Agent-User Interactive and MCP-Augmented Environments
  2. 2026APPSim-Bench: Bridging Real-world Apps and Reproducible Evaluation for Mobile GUI Agents
  3. 2026VISTA: A Versatile Interactive User Simulation Toolkit for Agent Evaluation
  4. 2024SPA-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for SmartPhone Agent Evaluation
  5. 2026DevicesWorld: Benchmarking Cross-Device Agents in Heterogeneous Environments
  6. 2026Benchmarking General Mobile Assistants in Challenging Real-World Scenarios
  7. 2025AppSelectBench: Application-Level Tool Selection Benchmark
  8. 2025VitaBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents with Versatile Interactive Tasks in Real-world Applications