ArXiv

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

Authors
Kaixin Ma, Di Feng, Alexander Metz...
Categories
cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11818v1
PDF
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.11818v1

Brief

MM-ToolSandBox presents a unified, stateful evaluation for visually grounded tool-calling agents using 500+ tools across 16 domains and an automated scenario pipeline that yielded 258 validated scenarios plus 50 UI variants. Evaluating 12 models (from ~4B open-weight to proprietary) finds the best model under 50% success and 53% of failures due to visual-information extraction, revealing a scale-dependent planning-to-precision crossover; benchmark and code are public.

Why it matters

MM-ToolSandBox is a stateful benchmark for visually grounded tool-calling agents providing 500+ tools across 16 application domains, multi-image/multi-turn tasks, and an automated generation pipeline that produced 258 human-verified nominal scenarios plus 50 UI-targeted variants; code released on 2026-07-13 at https://github.com/apple/ml-mmtoolsandbox.

Key details

  • Evaluation of 12 models (ranging from ~4B open-weight models to frontier proprietary systems) shows current systems are weak: the best model achieves under 50% success, and 53% of failures are caused by incorrect information extraction from images (visual precision).
  • The authors identify a scale-dependent 'planning-to-precision' crossover: smaller models primarily fail at deciding what to do (planning), while larger models more often fail at perceiving visual details, suggesting different improvement directions by model size.
Source evidence

Abstract

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

Comment: Benchmark link: https://github.com/apple/ml-mmtoolsandbox