mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Beyond Task Completion: Training Capable and Safe Computer-Use Agents

arXiv 2609.22178 ↗First posted 27 Aug 2026cs.LG cs.AI cs.CLcited by 0

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance

Abstract (arXiv)

Computer-use agents (CUAs) have made rapid progress in completing complex tasks through graphical user interfaces, yet post-training centered on task success alone does not induce reliable safety behavior. A reliable CUA must condition its execution on risk: it should complete ordinary benign tasks, avoid environmental hazards and continue when a safe completion path remains, and refuse when the goal is harmful or no safe path exists. To learn this conditional policy, we develop Safety and Capability Optimization for Policy Execution (SCOPE), which jointly post-trains a CUA for task-execution capability and safety-aware decision making. To provide aligned training data for this joint objective, we further introduce SCOPE-Gen, an automated pipeline that synthesizes verifiable capability tasks and converts them into paired environment-risk variants while preserving their original goals. Using the resulting tasks, we construct SATraj-OS, a trajectory dataset comprising capability demonstrations, safe continuations, and explicit refusals. SCOPE first learns from all three trajectory types through supervised fine-tuning and then further improves task completion through online reinforcement learning. Starting from Qwen3.5-9B, SCOPE-RL achieves a 54.17% task success rate on OSWorld and a 64.30% attack-avoidance rate on OS-BLIND, yielding the best aggregate capability--safety score of 58.80% among the evaluated agents. Ablations reveal asymmetric but complementary roles for the two forms of safety supervision: refusal trajectories account for most of the attack-avoidance gain, whereas risk-handling trajectories preserve greater task utility at comparable attack-avoidance levels.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 14 of its 42 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 Aug 2026.

Builds on

14 of 42 references.

Closest ancestors · 5

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026RUBAS: Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learning for Agent Safety2 Jun
  2. 2026On-Policy Self-Evolution via Failure Trajectories for Agentic Safety Alignment12 May
  3. 2026The Blind Spot of Agent Safety: How Benign User Instructions Expose Critical Vulnerabilities in Computer-Use Agents12 Apr
  4. 2026MirrorGuard: Toward Secure Computer-Use Agents via Simulation-to-Real Reasoning Correction19 Jan
  5. 2025OS-Harm: A Benchmark for Measuring Safety of Computer Use Agents17 Jun

Other references · 9

  1. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
  2. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 1,908
  3. 2019Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelismcited by 1,829
  4. 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,134
  5. 2023SGLang: Efficient Execution of Structured Language Model Programscited by 1,107
  6. 2026EvoCUA: Evolving Computer Use Agents via Learning from Scalable Synthetic Experiencecited by 51
  7. 2025ComputerRL: Scaling End-to-End Online Reinforcement Learning for Computer Use Agentscited by 49
  8. 2026OSWorld 2.0: Benchmarking Computer Use Agents on Long-Horizon Real-World Taskscited by 29
  9. 2026Safactory: A Scalable Agentic Infrastructure for Training Trustworthy Autonomous Intelligencecited by 1

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Not cited yet.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026SkillHarness: Harnessing Safe Skills for Computer-Use Agents
  2. 2026OSGuard: A Benchmark for Safety in Computer-Use Agents
  3. 2026LPS-Bench: Benchmarking Safety Awareness of Computer-Use Agents in Long-Horizon Planning under Benign and Adversarial Scenarios
  4. 2026SCOUT: Synergizing Reasoning and Tool-Use for Computer-Use Safety
  5. 2026RePolicy: Reinforcement Learning for Safety-Policy Invocation in Agent Safeguards
  6. 2025Building a Foundational Guardrail for General Agentic Systems via Synthetic Data
  7. 2026ToolSafe: Enhancing Tool Invocation Safety of LLM-based agents via Proactive Step-level Guardrail and Feedback
  8. 2026Imagine to Ensure Safety in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning