mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Watch and Learn: Learning to Use Computers from Online Videos

arXiv 2510.04673 ↗First posted 6 Oct 2025cs.AI cs.CVcited by 9

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Abstract (arXiv)

Computer-using agents (CUAs) must plan task workflows across diverse and evolving applications, yet progress is limited by the lack of large-scale, high-quality training data. Existing datasets are narrow, static, and costly to annotate, while synthetic data often yields oversimplified or misaligned behaviors. We present Watch & Learn (W&L), a framework that converts readily available Internet videos of human computer use into executable UI trajectories at scale. Instead of directly generating actions or relying on handcrafted heuristics, we cast trajectory annotation as an inverse dynamics problem that predicts user actions from consecutive screen states, which simplifies learning and generalizes across domains. Through a task-aware retrieval and labeling pipeline, W&L yields over 53K high-quality trajectories that enhance CUAs both as in-context exemplars and as supervised training data. On OSWorld, it consistently improves general-purpose and specialized CUAs, while on WindowsAgentArena it achieves state-of-the-art performance among 7B-scale models under the 15-step limit. These results show that web-scale human demonstration videos can serve as a practical and scalable foundation for advancing real-world CUAs.

Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 36 of its 48 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Oct 2025.

Builds on

36 of 48 references.

References · 36

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
  2. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,418
  3. 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Webcited by 1,210
  4. 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,134
  5. 2025SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Featurescited by 1,127
  6. 2025UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agentscited by 584
  7. 2024GPT-4V(ision) is a Generalist Web Agent, if Groundedcited by 547
  8. 2024Navigating the Digital World as Humans Do: Universal Visual Grounding for GUI Agentscited by 373
  9. 2024Agent Workflow Memorycited by 342
  10. 2022Video PreTraining (VPT): Learning to Act by Watching Unlabeled Online Videoscited by 338
  11. 2023Android in the Wild: A Large-Scale Dataset for Android Device Controlcited by 314
  12. 2024WebRL: Training LLM Web Agents via Self-Evolving Online Curriculum Reinforcement Learningcited by 243
24 more
  1. 2024Windows Agent Arena: Evaluating Multi-Modal OS Agents at Scalecited by 212
  2. 2024Many-Shot In-Context Learningcited by 203
  3. 2024On the Effects of Data Scale on UI Control Agentscited by 187
  4. 2024Agent S: An Open Agentic Framework that Uses Computers Like a Humancited by 182
  5. 2023Synapse: Trajectory-as-Exemplar Prompting with Memory for Computer Controlcited by 180
  6. 2025DreamGen: Unlocking Generalization in Robot Learning through Video World Modelscited by 168
  7. 2025Agent S2: A Compositional Generalist-Specialist Framework for Computer Use Agentscited by 156
  8. 2024OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesiscited by 155
  9. 2025OpenCUA: Open Foundations for Computer-Use Agentscited by 151
  10. 2024Is Your LLM Secretly a World Model of the Internet? Model-Based Planning for Web Agentscited by 144
  11. 2025Scaling Computer-Use Grounding via User Interface Decomposition and Synthesiscited by 132
  12. 2024AgentTrek: Agent Trajectory Synthesis via Guiding Replay with Web Tutorialscited by 123
  13. 2025Learn-by-interact: A Data-Centric Framework for Self-Adaptive Agents in Realistic Environmentscited by 93
  14. 2025Explorer: Scaling Exploration-driven Web Trajectory Synthesis for Multimodal Web Agentscited by 68
  15. 2024NNetNav: Unsupervised Learning of Browser Agents Through Environment Interaction in the Wildcited by 55
  16. 2024OpenWebVoyager: Building Multimodal Web Agents via Iterative Real-World Exploration, Feedback and Optimizationcited by 45
  17. 2024Synatra: Turning Indirect Knowledge into Direct Demonstrations for Digital Agents at Scalecited by 43
  18. 2024BAGEL: Bootstrapping Agents by Guiding Exploration with Languagecited by 34
  19. 2024Dual-View Visual Contextualization for Web Navigationcited by 24
  20. 2025Scalable Video-to-Dataset Generation for Cross-Platform Mobile Agentscited by 14
  21. 2025Scaling Agents for Computer Usecited by 14
  22. 2025Improving Large Language Model Planning with Action Sequence Similaritycited by 7
  23. 2025Fact-Augmented Lookahead Planning for LLM Agentscited by 7
  24. 2025Leveraging In-Context Learning for Language Model Agentscited by 4

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 9.

9 papers.