# Video-Based Reward Modeling for Computer-Use Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10178 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10178/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 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.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [GUI and mobile agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/gui-and-mobile-agents/)
- LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation / [Diffusion and multimodal model alignment](https://mlsanity.com/alignment/diffusion-and-multimodal-model-alignment/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13854/) (2023)
- [LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13372/) (2024)
- [Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06070/) (2023)
- [OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07972/) (2024)
- [Token Merging: Your ViT But Faster](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09461/) (2022)
- [CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08914/) (2023)
- [An Image is Worth 1/2 Tokens After Layer 2: Plug-and-Play Inference Acceleration for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06764/) (2024)
- [UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12326/) (2025)
- [AndroidWorld: A Dynamic Benchmarking Environment for Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14573/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-PruMerge: Adaptive Token Reduction for Efficient Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15388/) (2024)
- [Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17146/) (2024)
- [WebRL: Training LLM Web Agents via Self-Evolving Online Curriculum Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02337/) (2024)
- [ScreenSpot-Pro: GUI Grounding for Professional High-Resolution Computer Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07981/) (2025)
- [ShowUI: One Vision-Language-Action Model for GUI Visual Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17465/) (2024)
- [Windows Agent Arena: Evaluating Multi-Modal OS Agents at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08264/) (2024)
- [DigiRL: Training In-The-Wild Device-Control Agents with Autonomous Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11896/) (2024)
- [OmniParser for Pure Vision Based GUI Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00203/) (2024)
- [Mobile-Agent-v3: Fundamental Agents for GUI Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15144/) (2025)
- [OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19723/) (2024)
- [OpenCUA: Open Foundations for Computer-Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09123/) (2025)
- [Agent S2: A Compositional Generalist-Specialist Framework for Computer Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00906/) (2025)
- [Scaling Computer-Use Grounding via User Interface Decomposition and Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13227/) (2025)
- [Molmo2: Open Weights and Data for Vision-Language Models with Video Understanding and Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10611/) (2026)
- [Autonomous Evaluation and Refinement of Digital Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06474/) (2024)
- [AgentRewardBench: Evaluating Automatic Evaluations of Web Agent Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08942/) (2025)
- [GTA1: GUI Test-time Scaling Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05791/) (2025)
- [AutoGLM: Autonomous Foundation Agents for GUIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00820/) (2024)
- [SPA-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for SmartPhone Agent Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15164/) (2024)
- [Explorer: Scaling Exploration-driven Web Trajectory Synthesis for Multimodal Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11357/) (2025)
- [SEAgent: Self-Evolving Computer Use Agent with Autonomous Learning from Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04700/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [The Blind Spot of Agent Safety: How Benign User Instructions Expose Critical Vulnerabilities in Computer-Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10577/) (2026)
- [CUA-Suite: Massive Human-annotated Video Demonstrations for Computer-Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24440/) (2026)
- [Securing Computer-Use Agents: A Unified Architecture-Lifecycle Framework for Deployment-Grounded Reliability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07110/) (2026)

## 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.