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ByteDance’s UI-TARS can take over your computer, outperforms GPT-4o and Claude

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More A new AI agent has emerged from the parent company of TikTok to take control of your computer and perform complex workflows. Much like Anthropic’s Computer Use, ByteDance’s new UI-TARS understands graphical user interfaces (GUIs), applies […]

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A new AI agent has emerged from the parent company of TikTok to take control of your computer and perform complex workflows.

Much like Anthropic’s Computer Use, ByteDance’s new UI-TARS understands graphical user interfaces (GUIs), applies reasoning and takes autonomous, step-by-step action. 

Trained on roughly 50B tokens and offered in 7B and 72B parameter versions, the PC/MacOS agents achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on 10-plus GUI benchmarks across performance, perception, grounding and overall agent capabilities, consistently beating out OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Claude and Google’s Gemini.

“Through iterative training and reflection tuning, UI-TARS continuously learns from its mistakes and adapts to unforeseen situations with minimal human intervention,” researchers from ByteDance and Tsinghua University write in a new research paper

Source: Arxiv

How UI-TARS explains its thinking

UI-TARS works across desktop, mobile and web applications, using multimodal inputs (text, images, interactions) to understand visual environments.

Its UI features two tabs — one to the left showing its step-by-step “thinking,” and a larger one to the right where it pulls up files, websites and apps and automatically takes action. 

For example, in a demo video released today, the model is prompted to “Find round trip flights from SEA to NYC on the 5th and return on the 10th next month and filter by price in ascending order.”

In response, UI-TARS navigates to the website for Delta Airlines, fills in the “from” and “to” fields, clicks in the relevant dates and sorts and filters by price, explaining each step in its thinking box before taking action. 

In another scenario, it is instructed to install an autoDocstring extension in VS Code. Here is its step-by-step thinking as it completes that task: 

  • It first reports that “to proceed with installing the autoDocstring extension in VS Code, I first need to open the VS Code application.” 
  • Recognizing that the VS Code window has not fully loaded, the model notes that “it is necessary to wait for the application to finish initializing before proceeding with the installation of the autoDocstring extension. This ensures that all required functionalities are available for the next steps.” 
  • It then explains that it must access the Extensions view in VS Code, which can be done by clicking on a tab in the left sidebar. 
  • Running into a small glitch, it reasons: “The previous attempt to click on the ‘Extensions’ tab may not have been precise enough, so I will try clicking on it again to ensure the Extensions view opens successfully.”
  • Once in the Extensions view, it types in ‘autoDocstring’ before concluding: “Since the installation process has already been initiated, there is no further action required at this moment. I will wait for the installation to complete and confirm its success once the process is finished.”

Outperforming its rivals

Across a variety of benchmarks, researchers report that UI-TARS consistently outranked OpenAI’s GPT-4o; Anthropic’s Claude-3.5-Sonnet; Gemini-1.5-Pro and Gemini-2.0; four Qwen models; and numerous academic models.

For instance, in VisualWebBench — which measures a model’s ability to ground web elements including webpage quality assurance and optical character recognition — UI-TARS 72B scored 82.8%, outperforming GPT-4o (78.5%) and Claude 3.5 (78.2%). 

It also did significantly better on WebSRC benchmarks (understanding of semantic content and layout in web contexts) and ScreenQA-short (comprehension of complex mobile screen layouts and web structure). UI-TARS-7B achieved leading scores of 93.6% on WebSRC, while UI-TARS-72B achieved 88.6% on ScreenQA-short, outperforming Qwen, Gemini, Claude 3.5 and GPT-4o. 

“These results demonstrate the superior perception and comprehension capabilities of UI-TARS in web and mobile environments,” the researchers write. “Such perceptual ability lays the foundation for agent tasks, where accurate environmental understanding is crucial for task execution and decision-making.”

UI-TARS also showed impressive results in ScreenSpot Pro and ScreenSpot v2 , which assess a model’s ability to understand and localize elements in GUIs. Further, researchers tested its capabilities in planning multi-step actions and low-level tasks in mobile environments, and benchmarked it on OSWorld (which assesses open-ended computer tasks) and AndroidWorld (which scores autonomous agents on 116 programmatic tasks across 20 mobile apps). 

Source: Arxiv
Source: Arxiv

Under the hood

To help it take step-by-step actions and recognize what it’s seeing, UI-TARS was trained on a large-scale dataset of screenshots that parsed metadata including element description and type, visual description, bounding boxes (position information), element function and text from various websites, applications and operating systems. This allows the model to provide a comprehensive, detailed description of a screenshot, capturing not only elements but spatial relationships and overall layout. 

The model also uses state transition captioning to identify and describe the differences between two consecutive screenshots and determine whether an action — such as a mouse click or keyboard input — has occurred. Meanwhile, set-of-mark (SoM) prompting allows it to overlay distinct marks (letters, numbers) on specific regions of an image. 

The model is equipped with both short-term and long-term memory to handle tasks at hand while also retaining historical interactions to improve later decision-making. Researchers trained the model to perform both System 1 (fast, automatic and intuitive) and System 2 (slow and deliberate) reasoning. This allows for multi-step decision-making, “reflection” thinking, milestone recognition and error correction. 

Researchers emphasized that it is critical that the model be able to maintain consistent goals and engage in trial and error to hypothesize, test and evaluate potential actions before completing a task. They introduced two types of data to support this: error correction and post-reflection data. For error correction, they identified mistakes and labeled corrective actions; for post-reflection, they simulated recovery steps. 

“This strategy ensures that the agent not only learns to avoid errors but also adapts dynamically when they occur,” the researchers write.

Clearly, UI-TARS exhibits impressive capabilities, and it’ll be interesting to see its evolving use cases in the increasingly competitive AI agents space. As the researchers note: “Looking ahead, while native agents represent a significant leap forward, the future lies in the integration of active and lifelong learning, where agents autonomously drive their own learning through continuous, real-world interactions.”

Researchers point out that Claude Computer Use “performs strongly in web-based tasks but significantly struggles with mobile scenarios, indicating that the GUI operation ability of Claude has not been well transferred to the mobile domain.” 

By contrast, “UI-TARS exhibits excellent performance in both website and mobile domain.” 

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2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

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OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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