Cowork agents navigate dependencies across tools and files while adapting to changing user requirements and edits to shared workspaces. Scaling such environments requires maintaining consistency among task objectives, executable resources, user behavior, and success criteria. We introduce Cowork-Gym, a framework that synthesizes Cowork environments through a build-execute-revise loop that uses execution evidence and review feedback to validate and repair generated environments. To capture realistic Cowork dynamics, a stateful user simulator responds to the agent's actions through dialogue and direct edits to the shared workspace. We synthesize 64.9K environments across 14 application scenarios and use them to post-train 9B, 27B, and 35B-A3B Qwen models with supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and on-policy distillation. Averaged across six agentic benchmarks, these models outperform their corresponding base checkpoints by 8.7, 6.4, and 4.1 points, respectively. Ours-27B ranks second overall among the evaluated models and achieves the highest average scores on PawBench and ClawEval, outperforming models with over 100B total parameters on both benchmarks.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Scale, diversity, and downstream impact of synthesized Cowork environments. Left: Our environment-synthesis pipeline produces 64.9K tasks across 14 top-level scenarios, with representative workspaces illustrating diverse personal and professional workflows. Right: The leaderboard demonstrates the effectiveness of training on these environments: Ours-27B ranks second across six agentic benchmarks and achieves the highest average scores on PawBench and ClawEval among the evaluated models.
Figure 2: Cowork environment packaging and rollout. (a) Each environment is represented as a Harbor-compatible task package augmented with a user simulator, bundling the task instruction, runtime, reference solution, verifier, and user profiles. (b) During rollout, the user simulator communicates with the acting agent. It also observes and edits the shared workspace state in response to the agent’s progress. (c) The resulting trajectory records user messages, agent actions, and tool observations; the hybrid verifier then evaluates it.
Figure 3: Overview of Cowork environment synthesis and agent training. Left: Environment synthesis starts with (a) Task Specification ( Section 3.1 ) and proceeds through (b) the Build–Execute–Revise loop ( Section 3.2 ). Right: (c) Trajectory Generation with stateful user simulation is followed by (d) Filtering ( Section 3.4 ). Bottom: The resulting environments and trajectories support agent training with SFT, RL, and OPD.
Figure 4: Cowork environment synthesis and stateful user simulation. Left: The interaction loop among user, agent, and the environment in the real world. Right: The user simulator runs outside the acting-agent sandbox and conditions each intervention on private user state and current task progress. The .user/ directory stores persistent context; .patch/ provides turn-specific behavioral instructions and authorized workspace updates. The acting agent observes only public messages and the resulting changes( Section 3.3 ).
Table 5
Figure 6: ClawEval performance of Ours-9B, Ours-27B, and Ours-35B-A3B over supervised training, with progress normalized to the final checkpoint.
Model
Single turn
Multi turn
ClawEval
ClawEval-MT
ClawMark
Score
Pass@3 (%)
Score
Pass (%)
Score
Qwen3.6-27B
–
–
73.11
68.9
80.57
71.1
62.33
Ours-27B
✓
–
84.13 +11.02
79.7 +10.8
84.01 +3.44
83.3 +12.2
69.27 +6.94
Ours-27B
✓
✓
85.08 +11.97
80.6 +11.7
84.44 +3.87
81.6 +10.5
72.50 +10.17
Table 3: Effect of interactive supervision on 27B models. Metrics are reported on a 0–100 scale; green badges indicate absolute gains over Qwen3.6-27B.
Training source
QwenPaw SEEN
OpenClaw SEEN
Hermes UNSEEN
Base model
20.0
24.5
15.5
QwenPaw only
29.1 +9.1
27.3 +2.8
22.7 +7.2
OpenClaw only
30.0 +10.0
29.1 +4.6
24.5 +9.0
QwenPaw + OpenClaw
31.8 +11.8
31.8 +7.3
24.5 +9.0
Table 4: Cross-harness generalization of Qwen3.5-9B on PawBench. Results are pass rates; green badges show absolute gains over the base model, with darker shades indicating larger gains.
Selection
ClawEval Avg.
PawBench Pass (%)
ClawMark Avg.
Qwen3.5-9B
Base model
0.6535
24.55
0.3276
No filter
0.7238
27.88
0.3267
NLL
0.7295
29.39
0.4010
RSR
0.7174
28.48
0.3991
Qwen3.6-27B
Table 5: Effect of model-conditioned trajectory filtering across model sizes. NLL and RSR each retain 70% of the candidate trajectories.
Figure 7: Agentic transfer and general-capability retention under OPD. Dashed lines mark SFT teacher performance; exposure is normalized to the final checkpoint.
Appendix figures & tables4 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Dimension
Assignment
What it controls
Capabilities
Multi-label
Operations expected to be required by the task.
Application scenario
Single path
Primary domain and use case.
Structure and difficulty
Structured attributes
Anticipated workflow, feedback, and task depth.
User and deliverable
Structured attributes
Target user, output format, style, and length.
Modality
Multi-label
Input and output channels.
Safety and alignment
Multi-label
Relevant risks and expected response behavior.
Appendix
Table 6: The six dimensions of the task taxonomy.
Capability
Scope
Logic_Reasoning
Causal, deductive, abductive, and constraint-based reasoning.
Math_Scientific
Arithmetic, statistical, and scientific calculation.
Code_Manipulation
Code generation, debugging, review, refactoring, and testing.
Tool_Calling
Tool selection, argument construction, and chained tool use.
Knowledge_Retrieval
Evidence extraction, cross-document comparison, and retrieval verification.
Web_Browsing
Web search, page retrieval, extraction, and interaction.
Appendix
Table 7: Capability labels and their scope.
Scenario
Subdomains
Example leaf
Office_Productivity
Email, Calendar, Document, Meeting, Task Management, Expense
Inbox_Triage
Information_Retrieval
Academic, Market, News, Social Platform, Knowledge Base
Literature_Review
Finance_Investment
Stock, Financial Report, Forex, Investment Research
Earnings_Analysis
Software_Engineering
Code, Frontend, DevOps, GitHub, Database
Debugging
Data_Science
Business Intelligence, Financial Analysis, Text Analytics
KPI_Dashboard
Content_Media
Writing, Social Media, Design, Video and Audio
Academic_Writing
Appendix
Table 8: Top-level application scenarios, subdomains, and representative leaves.
AI coworkers must coordinate tools, communicate across turns, and act on changing workspace state while respecting workflow constraints. Constructing training experience for these capabilities requires coherent requests, service records, tool interfaces, and grading checks. We present CoworkEnv, a capability-guided framework for synthesizing executable training environments for AI coworkers. Workflow requirements guide task construction, and programmatic validation with feedback repair checks generated specifications and grading behavior. Teacher executions yield curated demonstrations for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), while student interactions provide rollouts and rewards for reinforcement learning (RL). Using these resources, we train compact PocketWorker models. For Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct, SFT raises the mean score from 46.6 to 64.1 on Claw-Eval, including a 31.9-point gain on Multi-turn tasks. An SFT-only extension to ClawMark demonstrates applicability across coworker benchmarks. We further compare RL training dynamics across configurations that vary reward processing and credit assignment. Improving training rewards provide preliminary evidence that the constructed environments support policy optimization.
Zhongwei Xie, Yiming Du, Jiaxin Bai +10
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · The Chinese University of Hong Kong · Hong Kong Baptist University +1
Language-model agents are increasingly used as persistent coworkers that assist users across multiple working days. During such workflows, the surrounding environment may change independently of the agent: new emails arrive, calendar entries shift, knowledge-base records are updated, and evidence appears across images, scanned PDFs, audio, video, and spreadsheets. Existing benchmarks do not adequately evaluate this setting because they typically run within a single static episode and remain largely text-centric. We introduce \bench{}, a benchmark for coworker agents built around multi-turn multi-day tasks, a stateful sandboxed service environment whose state evolves between turns, and rule-based verification. The current release contains 100 tasks across 13 professional scenarios, executed against five stateful sandboxed services (filesystem, email, calendar, knowledge base, spreadsheet) and scored by 1537 deterministic Python checkers over post-execution service state; no LLM-as-judge is invoked during scoring. We benchmark seven frontier agent systems. The strongest model reaches 75.8 weighted score, but the best strict Task Success is only 20.0%, indicating that partial progress is common while complete end-to-end workflow completion remains rare. Turn-level analysis shows that performance drops after the first exogenous environment update, highlighting adaptation to changing state as a key open challenge. We release the benchmark, evaluation harness, and construction pipeline to support reproducible coworker-agent evaluation.
Scaling interactive environments is important for training long-horizon agents through reinforcement learning. These environments often require further testing and refinement after initial generation, and correcting defects in a task may also require updating its work context and verifier. However, existing construction pipelines offer limited support for such iterative refinement while keeping these components aligned. We introduce WorkRover, a framework for training long-horizon cowork agents through recursive environment evolution. Its harness-driven synthesis enables construction agents to jointly build and validate semantically aligned work contexts, executable tasks, and evidence-grounded verifiers, adapting their actions to workspace state and execution feedback rather than following a fixed construction workflow. To support environment evolution, we introduce Factorial Compatibility Replay (FCR), which uses rollout feedback to evaluate combinations of component revisions through dependency-closed replay and selects the smallest validated repair among tested candidates while preserving task requirements and evaluation constraints. To provide finer-grained training signals, we propose Verifier-to-Turn Credit Assignment (VTCA), which augments trajectory-level GRPO advantages with signals from deterministic workspace-progress checks and assigns a bounded share of positive-progress credit to prerequisite turns using recorded tool-output and artifact dependencies. Using WorkRover, we post-train Qwen3.5-35B-A3B to obtain WorkRover-35B-A3B and evaluate it on several cowork-agent benchmarks. Its reported scores exceed those of Qwen3.5-35B-A3B by 26.27 percentage points on JobBench, 29.32 percentage points on OfficeQA Pro, and 413.25 Elo points on GDPval v2. These results suggest that WorkRover offers a promising foundation for scalable training of long-horizon cowork agents.