mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Video-Based Reward Modeling for Computer-Use Agents

arXiv 2603.10178 ↗First posted 10 Mar 2026cs.CV cs.CLcited by 3

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → GUI and mobile agents

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

Computer-using agents (CUAs) are becoming increasingly capable; however, it remains difficult to scale evaluation of whether a trajectory truly fulfills a user instruction. In this work, we study reward modeling from execution video: a sequence of keyframes from an agent trajectory that is independent of the agent's internal reasoning or actions. Although video-execution modeling is method-agnostic, it presents key challenges, including highly redundant layouts and subtle, localized cues that determine success. We introduce Execution Video Reward 53k (ExeVR-53k), a dataset of 53k high-quality video--task--reward triplets. We further propose adversarial instruction translation to synthesize negative samples with step-level annotations. To enable learning from long, high-resolution execution videos, we design spatiotemporal token pruning, which removes homogeneous regions and persistent tokens while preserving decisive UI changes. Building on these components, we fine-tune an Execution Video Reward Model (ExeVRM) that takes only a user instruction and a video-execution sequence to predict task success. Our ExeVRM 8B achieves 84.7% accuracy and 87.7% recall on video-execution assessment, outperforming strong proprietary models such as GPT-5.2 and Gemini-3 Pro across Ubuntu, macOS, Windows, and Android, while providing more precise temporal attribution. These results show that video-execution reward modeling can serve as a scalable, model-agnostic evaluator for CUAs.

Key facts. Cited by 3 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 57 of its 73 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2026.

Builds on

57 of 73 references.

Closest ancestors · 24

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Building Autonomous GUI Navigation via Agentic-Q Estimation and Step-Wise Policy Optimization14 Feb
  2. 2026Adaptive Milestone Reward for GUI Agents12 Feb
  3. 2026GAIA: A Data Flywheel System for Training GUI Test-Time Scaling Critic Models26 Jan
  4. 2025CUARewardBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Reward Models on Computer-using Agent21 Oct
  5. 2025GUI-KV: Efficient GUI Agents via KV Cache with Spatio-Temporal Awareness1 Oct
  6. 2025ScaleCUA: Scaling Open-Source Computer Use Agents with Cross-Platform Data18 Sep
  7. 2025Mobile-Agent-v3: Fundamental Agents for GUI Automation21 Aug
  8. 2025OpenCUA: Open Foundations for Computer-Use Agents12 Aug
  9. 2025macOSWorld: A Multilingual Interactive Benchmark for GUI Agents4 Jun
  10. 2025ZeroGUI: Automating Online GUI Learning at Zero Human Cost29 May
  11. 2025UI-Genie: A Self-Improving Approach for Iteratively Boosting MLLM-based Mobile GUI Agents27 May
  12. 2025ProgRM: Build Better GUI Agents with Progress Rewards23 May
12 more
  1. 2025Scaling Computer-Use Grounding via User Interface Decomposition and Synthesis19 May
  2. 2025GUI-Shift: Enhancing VLM-Based GUI Agents through Self-supervised Reinforcement Learning18 May
  3. 2025ScreenSpot-Pro: GUI Grounding for Professional High-Resolution Computer Use4 Apr
  4. 2025Agent S2: A Compositional Generalist-Specialist Framework for Computer Use Agents1 Apr
  5. 2025UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agents21 Jan
  6. 2024OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis27 Dec
  7. 2024AutoGLM: Autonomous Foundation Agents for GUIs28 Oct
  8. 2024SPA-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for SmartPhone Agent Evaluation19 Oct
  9. 2024Windows Agent Arena: Evaluating Multi-Modal OS Agents at Scale12 Sep
  10. 2024DigiRL: Training In-The-Wild Device-Control Agents with Autonomous Reinforcement Learning14 Jun
  11. 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environments11 Apr
  12. 2023CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agents14 Dec

Other references · 33

  1. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 1,908
  2. 2024LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Modelscited by 1,442
  3. 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Webcited by 1,210
  4. 2022Token Merging: Your ViT But Fastercited by 995
  5. 2024An Image is Worth 1/2 Tokens After Layer 2: Plug-and-Play Inference Acceleration for Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 629
  6. 2024AndroidWorld: A Dynamic Benchmarking Environment for Autonomous Agentscited by 450
  7. 2024LLaVA-PruMerge: Adaptive Token Reduction for Efficient Large Multimodal Modelscited by 394
  8. 2024Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Modelscited by 321
  9. 2024WebRL: Training LLM Web Agents via Self-Evolving Online Curriculum Reinforcement Learningcited by 243
  10. 2024ShowUI: One Vision-Language-Action Model for GUI Visual Agentcited by 226
  11. 2024OmniParser for Pure Vision Based GUI Agentcited by 193
  12. 2024Autonomous Evaluation and Refinement of Digital Agentscited by 136
21 more
  1. 2026Molmo2: Open Weights and Data for Vision-Language Models with Video Understanding and Groundingcited by 132
  2. 2025GTA1: GUI Test-time Scaling Agentcited by 102
  3. 2025AgentRewardBench: Evaluating Automatic Evaluations of Web Agent Trajectoriescited by 99
  4. 2025Explorer: Scaling Exploration-driven Web Trajectory Synthesis for Multimodal Web Agentscited by 68
  5. 2025SEAgent: Self-Evolving Computer Use Agent with Autonomous Learning from Experiencecited by 68
  6. 2025Nemotron-Research-Tool-N1: Exploring Tool-Using Language Models with Reinforced Reasoningcited by 67
  7. 2024PruneVid: Visual Token Pruning for Efficient Video Large Language Modelscited by 64
  8. 2025HoliTom: Holistic Token Merging for Fast Video Large Language Modelscited by 58
  9. 2024NNetNav: Unsupervised Learning of Browser Agents Through Environment Interaction in the Wildcited by 55
  10. 2025Web-Shepherd: Advancing PRMs for Reinforcing Web Agentscited by 41
  11. 2024xGen-MM-Vid (BLIP-3-Video): You Only Need 32 Tokens to Represent a Video Even in VLMscited by 34
  12. 2025CoAct-1: Computer-using Multi-Agent System with Coding Actionscited by 33
  13. 2025Video-Thinker: Sparking "Thinking with Videos" via Reinforcement Learningcited by 32
  14. 2025GUI-Shepherd: Reliable Process Reward and Verification for Long-Sequence GUI Taskscited by 25
  15. 2025Evolving in Tasks: Empowering the Multi-modality Large Language Model as the Computer Use Agentcited by 10
  16. 2026FocusUI: Efficient UI Grounding via Position-Preserving Visual Token Selectioncited by 9
  17. 2025Agentic Lybic: Multi-Agent Execution System with Tiered Reasoning and Orchestrationcited by 8
  18. 2026WebArbiter: A Principle-Guided Reasoning Process Reward Model for Web Agentscited by 7
  19. 2026Spatio-Temporal Token Pruning for Efficient High-Resolution GUI Agentscited by 7
  20. 2025OS-Oracle: A Comprehensive Framework for Cross-Platform GUI Critic Modelscited by 6
  21. 2025LET-US: Long Event-Text Understanding of Scenescited by 3

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Learning from Online Videos at Inference Time for Computer-Use Agents
  2. 2025Goal-Driven Reward by Video Diffusion Models for Reinforcement Learning
  3. 2026OSReward: Instituting Standardized Evaluation for Cross-Platform Computer-Use Reward Models
  4. 2026CoRe: Co-Evolving Reward Models for Mitigating Latent Reward Hacking in Video Diffusion Models
  5. 2026Video Understanding Reward Modeling: A Robust Benchmark and Performant Reward Models
  6. 2026CUA-Gym: Scaling Verifiable Training Environments and Tasks for Computer-Use Agents
  7. 2026Reward Hacking Benchmark: Measuring Exploits in LLM Agents with Tool Use
  8. 2026Rewarding DINO: Predicting Dense Rewards with Vision Foundation Models