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Computer-Using World Model (arxiv.org)
1 point by steamboatwillie 222 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A model previews what a desktop screen will look like after a click or keystroke by first writing out what changes, then drawing the new screenshot. Letting an agent compare actions this way before acting made its Office-task choices more reliable than acting directly.

Abstract

Agents operating in complex software environments benefit from reasoning about the consequences of their actions, as even a single incorrect user interface (UI) operation can derail long, artifact-preserving workflows. This challenge is particularly acute for computer-using scenarios, where real execution does not support counterfactual exploration, making large-scale trial-and-error learning and planning impractical despite the environment being fully digital and deterministic. We introduce the Computer-Using World Model (CUWM), a world model for desktop software that predicts the next UI state given the current state and a candidate action. CUWM adopts a two-stage factorization of UI dynamics: it first predicts a textual description of agent-relevant state changes, and then realizes these changes visually to synthesize the next screenshot. CUWM is trained on offline UI transitions collected from agents interacting with real Microsoft Office applications, and further refined with a lightweight reinforcement learning stage that aligns textual transition predictions with the structural requirements of computer-using environments. We evaluate CUWM via test-time action search, where a frozen agent uses the world model to simulate and compare candidate actions before execution. Across a range of Office tasks, world-model-guided test-time scaling improves decision quality and execution robustness.

Yiming Guan, Rui Yu, John Zhang, Lu Wang, Chaoyun Zhang, Liqun Li, Bo Qiao, Si Qin, He Huang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Lukas Wutschitz, et al.
arXiv:2602.17365 · cs.SE · submitted Feb 19, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · 35 pages, 7 figures

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