# Learn from Weaknesses: Automated Domain Specialization for Small Computer-Use Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.28775 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28775/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 41 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Software engineering coding agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/software-engineering-coding-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07972/) (2024)
- [UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12326/) (2025)
- [Kimi K2.5: Visual Agentic Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02276/) (2026)
- [Navigating the Digital World as Humans Do: Universal Visual Grounding for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05243/) (2024)
- [OS-ATLAS: A Foundation Action Model for Generalist GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23218/) (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)
- [UI-TARS-2 Technical Report: Advancing GUI Agent with Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02544/) (2025)
- [Trial and Error: Exploration-Based Trajectory Optimization for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02502/) (2024)
- [On the Effects of Data Scale on UI Control Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03679/) (2024)
- [Qwen3.5-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15804/) (2026)
- [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)
- [AgentTrek: Agent Trajectory Synthesis via Guiding Replay with Web Tutorials](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09605/) (2024)
- [AgentDAM: Privacy Leakage Evaluation for Autonomous Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09780/) (2025)
- [Mobile-Agent-v3.5: Multi-platform Fundamental GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16855/) (2026)
- [SEAgent: Self-Evolving Computer Use Agent with Autonomous Learning from Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04700/) (2025)
- [TinyAgent: Function Calling at the Edge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00608/) (2024)
- [EvoCUA: Evolving Computer Use Agents via Learning from Scalable Synthetic Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15876/) (2026)
- [AgentSynth: Scalable Task Generation for Generalist Computer-Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14205/) (2025)
- [ZeroGUI: Automating Online GUI Learning at Zero Human Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23762/) (2025)
- [Fara-7B: An Efficient Agentic Model for Computer Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19663/) (2025)
- [macOSWorld: A Multilingual Interactive Benchmark for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04135/) (2025)
- [WorldGUI: An Interactive Benchmark for Desktop GUI Automation from Any Starting Point](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08047/) (2025)
- [Imitation Learning for Multi-turn LM Agents via On-policy Expert Corrections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14895/) (2025)
- [Efficient Agent Training for Computer Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13909/) (2025)
- [Unlocking the Power of Function Vectors for Characterizing and Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Continual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11019/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Not All Experience Belongs in the Weights: Component Routing for Self-Improving GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01787/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Computer-use agents (CUAs) have recently made substantial progress, but deploying a separate large expert for each software domain remains expensive. Small open computer-use agents are more practical specialization targets, but they remain substantially weaker and exhibit uneven domain-specific failures. A straightforward remedy is to synthesize large-scale training data for the target domain, yet we find that this naive approach yields only marginal improvements. Building on this observation, we introduce LearnWeak, an annotation-free specialization framework for small computer-use agents that uses a stronger reference agent to identify the student's weaknesses in the target domain, synthesize targeted tasks, and construct supervision automatically. LearnWeak further introduces an error-aware specialization objective that disentangles planning and execution errors, enabling more behaviorally precise updates than broad uniform supervision. On OSWorld, LearnWeak achieves average gains of 11.6 and 11.1 percentage points over EvoCUA-8B and OpenCUA-7B, respectively, across eight domains. We also validate that our student-aware dataset generation and training approaches outperform existing autonomous trajectory generation and training baselines. Our work highlights the importance of student awareness in both data synthesis and agent training, pointing toward a more principled and efficient path for specializing small computer-use agents in diverse domains.
