@inproceedings{soni-etal-2026-coding,
    title = "Coding Agents with Multimodal Browsing are Generalist Problem Solvers",
    author = "Soni, Aditya Bharat  and
      Li, Boxuan  and
      Wang, Xingyao  and
      Chen, Valerie  and
      Neubig, Graham",
    editor = "Demberg, Vera  and
      Inui, Kentaro  and
      Marquez, Llu{\'i}s",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {EACL} 2026",
    month = mar,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Rabat, Morocco",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.findings-eacl.318/",
    pages = "6052--6069",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-386-9",
    abstract = "Modern human labor is characterized by specialization; we train for years and develop particular tools that allow us to perform well across a variety of tasks. Similarly, specialized AI agents with task-specific tools or architectures often fail to generalize beyond their intended scope. In this work, we ask: *can agents achieve generalizability across diverse domains with a small, but well-chosen set of general tools?* We propose OpenHands-Versa, a single-agent system with a modest number of general tools like code execution, search engine, web browser and multimodal file viewer, for three practical domains: software engineering, deep research, and web browsing. Notably, OpenHands-Versa demonstrates superior or competitive performance over task-specific specialized agents on three challenging benchmarks: SWE-Bench Multimodal, GAIA, and The Agent Company, with absolute improvements in success rate of **9.1**, **1.3**, and **9.1** points, respectively. Thus, our *single-agent* system can achieve strong generalization indicating that specialist agents for these domains provide no practical benefit. Furthermore, we find that specialist multi-agent systems do not generalize beyond their intended scope. These findings establish OpenHands-Versa as a strong baseline for future research."
}