Scaling Agents for Computer Use
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → GUI and mobile agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Computer-use agents (CUAs) hold promise for automating everyday digital tasks, but their performance on long-horizon, complex problems remains unreliable. Single-rollout execution is brittle, with small errors compounding over time and leading to high variance in outcomes. While prior work has attempted to scale within a single rollout, such approaches have yielded limited gains. Scaling over multiple rollouts offers a more promising alternative but doing so effectively is challenging due to the difficulty of evaluating and selecting among long-horizon agent behaviors. We introduce Behavior Judge (BJudge), which addresses this challenge by representing agent executions as behavior narratives and comparing candidate behaviors at this level, substantially improving robustness and success rates. Using multiple rollouts, BJudge establishes a new state of the art (SoTA) in OSWorld at 72.6%, significantly outperforming prior methods and surpassing human-level performance at 72.36%, with comprehensive ablations validating key design choices. We further demonstrate strong generalization results to different operating systems on WindowsAgentArena and AndroidWorld. Crucially, our results highlight the strong effectiveness of scaling CUAs, when you do it right: effective scaling requires structured trajectory understanding and selection, and BJudge provides a practical framework to achieve this.
Key facts. Cited by 14 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 16 of its 61 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Oct 2025.
Builds on
16 of 61 references.
Closest ancestors · 6
Same direction, newest first
- 2025UI-Venus Technical Report: Building High-performance UI Agents with RFT14 Aug
- 2025GUI-Robust: A Comprehensive Dataset for Testing GUI Agent Robustness in Real-World Anomalies17 Jun
- 2025Agent S2: A Compositional Generalist-Specialist Framework for Computer Use Agents1 Apr
- 2024Agent S: An Open Agentic Framework that Uses Computers Like a Human10 Oct
- 2024Windows Agent Arena: Evaluating Multi-Modal OS Agents at Scale12 Sep
- 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environments11 Apr
Other references · 10
- 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,053
- 2023Let's Verify Step by Stepcited by 3,598
- 2023AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversationcited by 1,906
- 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Webcited by 1,210
- 2024AndroidWorld: A Dynamic Benchmarking Environment for Autonomous Agentscited by 450
- 2024Aguvis: Unified Pure Vision Agents for Autonomous GUI Interactioncited by 271
- 2025An Illusion of Progress? Assessing the Current State of Web Agentscited by 165
- 2025Scaling Test-time Compute for LLM Agentscited by 59
- 2025Multi-Turn Code Generation Through Single-Step Rewardscited by 27
- 2025Agentic Lybic: Multi-Agent Execution System with Tiered Reasoning and Orchestrationcited by 8
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 2; 2026: 12.
14 papers.
Sort:
By area:
- 2026CUA-Skill: Develop Skills for Computer Using Agentcited by 32
- 2026OmegaUse: Building a General-Purpose GUI Agent for Autonomous Task Executioncited by 13
- 2026When Benign Inputs Lead to Severe Harms: Eliciting Unsafe Unintended Behaviors of Computer-Use Agentscited by 13
- 2026Agent Alpha: Tree Search Unifying Generation, Exploration and Evaluation for Computer-Use Agentscited by 12
- 2025Watch and Learn: Learning to Use Computers from Online Videoscited by 9
- 2025Surfer 2: The Next Generation of Cross-Platform Computer Use Agentscited by 5
- 2026GUIDE: Resolving Domain Bias in GUI Agents through Real-Time Web Video Retrieval and Plug-and-Play Annotationcited by 4
- 2026VLAA-GUI: Knowing When to Stop, Recover, and Search, A Modular Framework for GUI Automationcited by 4
- 2026StructAgent: Harness Long-horizon Digital Agents with Unified Causal Structurecited by 4
- 2026Rethinking Inference-Time Scaling in Local Computer-Use Agents: Failure Modes and Compute Tradeoffscited by 0
- 2026When Is an Agent Evaluation Over? Outcome Finality and Cross-Unit Separationcited by 0
- 2026LocalLSTC: A Long Short-Term Control Architecture for Locally Deployed GUI Agentscited by 0
- 2026GUI-HARVEST: Self-Improving GUI Agents through Evidence-Driven Harness Evolution1 Oct 2026
- 2026ReLiveGym: Evaluating Long-Lived Agents over Weeks of Replayed Reality30 Sep 2026
- 2026LocalLSTC: A Long Short-Term Control Architecture for Locally Deployed GUI Agents26 Aug 2026
- 2026When Is an Agent Evaluation Over? Outcome Finality and Cross-Unit Separation14 Aug 2026
- 2026Rethinking Inference-Time Scaling in Local Computer-Use Agents: Failure Modes and Compute Tradeoffs30 Jul 2026
- 2026StructAgent: Harness Long-horizon Digital Agents with Unified Causal Structure13 Jul 2026
- 2026VLAA-GUI: Knowing When to Stop, Recover, and Search, A Modular Framework for GUI Automation23 Apr 2026
- 2026GUIDE: Resolving Domain Bias in GUI Agents through Real-Time Web Video Retrieval and Plug-and-Play Annotation27 Mar 2026
- 2026When Benign Inputs Lead to Severe Harms: Eliciting Unsafe Unintended Behaviors of Computer-Use Agents9 Feb 2026
- 2026Agent Alpha: Tree Search Unifying Generation, Exploration and Evaluation for Computer-Use Agents3 Feb 2026
- 2026CUA-Skill: Develop Skills for Computer Using Agent28 Jan 2026
- 2026OmegaUse: Building a General-Purpose GUI Agent for Autonomous Task Execution28 Jan 2026
2 more
- 2026OmegaUse: Building a General-Purpose GUI Agent for Autonomous Task Executioncited by 13
- 2026When Benign Inputs Lead to Severe Harms: Eliciting Unsafe Unintended Behaviors of Computer-Use Agentscited by 13
- 2025Surfer 2: The Next Generation of Cross-Platform Computer Use Agentscited by 5
- 2026VLAA-GUI: Knowing When to Stop, Recover, and Search, A Modular Framework for GUI Automationcited by 4
- 2026LocalLSTC: A Long Short-Term Control Architecture for Locally Deployed GUI Agentscited by 0
- 2026ReLiveGym: Evaluating Long-Lived Agents over Weeks of Replayed Realitycited by 0
- 2026GUI-HARVEST: Self-Improving GUI Agents through Evidence-Driven Harness Evolutioncited by 0
- 2026GUI-HARVEST: Self-Improving GUI Agents through Evidence-Driven Harness Evolution1 Oct 2026
- 2026ReLiveGym: Evaluating Long-Lived Agents over Weeks of Replayed Reality30 Sep 2026
- 2026LocalLSTC: A Long Short-Term Control Architecture for Locally Deployed GUI Agents26 Aug 2026
- 2026VLAA-GUI: Knowing When to Stop, Recover, and Search, A Modular Framework for GUI Automation23 Apr 2026
- 2026When Benign Inputs Lead to Severe Harms: Eliciting Unsafe Unintended Behaviors of Computer-Use Agents9 Feb 2026
- 2026OmegaUse: Building a General-Purpose GUI Agent for Autonomous Task Execution28 Jan 2026
- 2025Surfer 2: The Next Generation of Cross-Platform Computer Use Agents22 Oct 2025
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026OSWorld-Pro: Process-based Evaluation for Computer Use Agents
- 2025ScaleCUA: Scaling Open-Source Computer Use Agents with Cross-Platform Data
- 2026Computer Use at the Edge of the Statistical Precipice
- 2025OS-MAP: How Far Can Computer-Using Agents Go in Breadth and Depth?
- 2026cua-speedrun: Standardized Benchmarking of the Speed of Computer-Use Agents
- 2025CUARewardBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Reward Models on Computer-using Agent
- 2024On the Effects of Data Scale on UI Control Agents
- 2026MacAgentBench: Benchmarking AI Agents on Real-World macOS Desktop