Organizations: Fudan University · Shanghai AI Laboratory · University of Science and Technology of China · Shanghai Jiaotong University · East China Normal University · Nanjing University · The University of Hong Kong
Computer-using agents are increasingly capable of performing complex tasks in the digital world. However, high-quality interaction trajectories remain scarce for specialized desktop applications, where limited application knowledge, cumbersome GUI workflows, and incomplete exploration hinder automated collection. We introduce OS-Wizard, an automated trajectory collection framework. It combines tutorial-guided exploration with a hybrid GUI--Code action space, providing application-specific knowledge and simplifying GUI workflows through direct execution of application-native commands. The framework also checkpoints and revisits pivotal states during tree exploration to explore alternative workflows, complementing linear rollouts for broader coverage. We collect 10.9K trajectories comprising 54.9K state--action samples. Fine-tuning open-source base models on this corpus yields a best-performing model that improves performance on a benchmark of specialized desktop workflows by 58.2 percentage points to 64.1%, surpassing reported human performance of 59.8% and establishing a new state of the art. The fine-tuned model also improves performance on general desktop workflows using GUI actions only, suggesting that the collected supervision benefits general desktop tasks as well. Comparative experiments and ablations demonstrate the efficiency of trajectory collection and the importance of code actions.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Three interaction paths for the same visualization task in ChimeraX. Top: A GUI-only workflow takes 10 actions to open the dialog, configure parameters, and apply the settings. Middle: Our domain-specific code interface executes the equivalent application-native command with a single action. Bottom: Entering the command through the GUI takes 3 actions to click the input, type the command, and press Enter.
Figure 2: Overview of trajectory collection in OS-Wizard. Left: Tutorials guide exploration with GUI and code actions. Center: Cold-start navigation builds an initial tree and checkpoints pivotal states. Right: Parallel tree exploration and linear rollouts collect trajectories. Bottom: Execution checks and reward-model verification ensure trajectory quality.
Figure 3: Left: Two-stage collection in the tree exploration component of OS-Wizard. Right: Snapshot-assisted state recovery (§ 3.4 ): find and restore the nearest saved ancestor, then replay all actions along the path to the target while checking screenshot similarity.
Model
Astron
Biochem
GIS
Alg
ATP
Doc
Overall
Human †
51.5
69.0
55.9
74.2
42.3
68.8
59.8
Base models
Qwen3-VL-8B ( Bai et al., 2025 )
12.1
10.3
2.9
9.7
0.0
0.0
6.5
Qwen3.5-27B ( Qwen Team, 2026a )
12.1
13.8
2.9
0.0
0.0
6.3
5.9
Proprietary models
GPT-5.5 ( OpenAI, 2026a )
18.2
41.4
11.8
9.7
3.8
31.3
18.3
Table 1: ScienceBoard success rates (%). † denotes results reported in the original paper; all other results are evaluated by us with a maximum step limit of 50. Results in the Ours block are reported as mean ± standard deviation over three evaluation runs, while results of SCALECUA-Qwen3.5-9B are reported as means. Best results are bolded and the second best results are underlined .
Model
Overall
Base models
Qwen3-VL-8B †
33.9
Qwen3.5-27B
39.1
Ours
OS-Wizard-Qwen3.5-27B
42.9
Figure 4: (a) OSWorld success rates (%). OS-Wizard-Qwen3.5-27B uses a maximum step limit of 50, and † denotes results reported in the original paper. (b) ScienceBoard ablations on domain-specific code supervision and trajectory collection strategies using Qwen3.5-27B. The code ablation randomly samples trajectories containing no code calls throughout, yielding 20K training samples.
Figure 5: Scaling and recovery-efficiency analysis of OS-Wizard. (a) ScienceBoard success rate as a function of training data size for Qwen3.5-4B, 9B, and 27B. (b) Average replay overhead of standard BFS, standard BFS with pivotal-checkpoint recovery, and standard BFS with pivotal checkpoints and continuous single-branch execution.
Appendix figures & tables4 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Action
Parameters
Execution semantics
key
keys (list)
Press a single key or a key combination, releasing the keys afterwards.
key_down
key (string)
Hold a key without releasing it.
key_up
key (string)
Release a held key.
type
text (string)
Enter text using pyautogui.typewrite .
mouse_move
coordinate
Move the cursor to the specified location.
left_click
coordinate
Click the left mouse button.
Appendix
Table 2: Model-facing action space in Qwen tool-call format and its environment execution semantics. Parameters are fields in the arguments of computer_use ; coordinate is an (x,y) pair.
Application
Syntax
Operation
ChimeraX
CODE <command>
Execute a native ChimeraX command.
GRASS GIS
CODE gcmd <cmdline>
Execute a console command and display its output in the Tool window.
CODE switch <location> <mapset>
Switch to the specified location and mapset under /home/user/grassdata .
CODE load <layer>
Load the named layer from the current mapset.
KAlgebra
CODE calc <expr>
Submit an expression to the Calculator.
CODE 2d <expr>
Add a two-dimensional curve.
Appendix
Table 3: CODE action definitions. Angle brackets denote arguments supplied by the agent. File operations are shared by Lean 4 and TeXstudio; TeXstudio additionally supports forwarding commands to a running ChimeraX or KAlgebra instance.
Application
Trajectories
Training samples
Mean steps
Celestia
1,120
7,401
6.61
ChimeraX
1,411
6,458
4.58
GRASS GIS
1,561
5,487
3.52
KAlgebra
1,636
7,841
4.79
Lean 4
1,486
7,546
5.08
TeXstudio
591
2,763
4.68
Appendix
Table 4: Application-level dataset statistics. Samples and mean trajectory lengths include terminal steps. The overall mean is weighted by trajectory count.
Setting
Qwen3.5-27B
Fine-tuning method
Full-parameter SFT
DeepSpeed ZeRO stage
2
Hardware
16× H200
Precision
BF16
Maximum sequence length
32,768
Per-device batch size
1
Appendix
Table 5: Training settings for the main Qwen3.5-27B experiment on the full corpus. Other experiments use similar training settings with minor adjustments. The effective global batch size is the per-device batch size multiplied by the gradient accumulation steps and the number of data-parallel workers.
General-purpose computer-use agents have shown impressive performance across diverse digital environments. However, our new benchmark, OSExpert-Eval, indicates they remain far less helpful than human experts. Although inference-time scaling enables adaptation, these agents complete complex tasks inefficiently with degraded performance, transfer poorly to unseen UIs, and struggle with fine-grained action sequences. To solve the problem, we introduce a GUI-based depth-first search (GUI-DFS) exploration algorithm to comprehensively explore and verify an environment's unit functions. The agent then exploits compositionality between unit skills to self-construct a curriculum for composite tasks. To support fine-grained actions, we curate a database of action primitives for agents to discover during exploration; these are saved as a skill set once the exploration is complete. We use the learned skills to improve the agent's performance and efficiency by (1) enriching agents with ready-to-use procedural knowledge, allowing them to plan only once for long trajectories and generate accurate actions, and (2) enabling them to end inference-time scaling earlier by realizing their boundary of capabilities. Extensive experiments show that our environment-learned agent takes a meaningful step toward expert-level computer use, achieving a around 20 percent performance gain on OSExpert-Eval and closing the efficiency gap to humans by around 80 percent
Jiateng Liu, Zhenhailong Wang, Rushi Wang +6
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Stevens Institute of Technology
GUI agents require high-quality interaction trajectories to learn how software environments respond to actions, maintain state, and support multi-step workflows. However, the diversity of available trajectories is constrained by the applications, interface states, and workflows accessible in the underlying environments. Expanding this coverage requires deploying increasingly diverse and complex software, with specialized applications imposing additional installation, configuration, and runtime costs. We introduce AutoGUIWorld, a data generation framework that combines the visual priors of image generators with the task knowledge of a planner to synthesize GUI interaction trajectories without deploying or running the corresponding software environments. AutoGUIWorld samples initial GUI scenes from structured specifications of operating-system context, visual appearance, and interface state, and generates tasks conditioned on those scenes. A planner then specifies atomic actions and their intended visual consequences, while an image generator iteratively edits the current screenshot to produce subsequent observations. Action grounding and transition-level quality filtering yield 79,266 spatially annotated step-level training samples across Ubuntu, Windows, macOS, and Chrome. Fine-tuning Qwen3.5-35B-A3B on AutoGUIWorld trajectories improves the mean task score on OSWorld from 33.0% to 40.8% and the task success rate on ScienceBoard from 14.0% to 32.2%. These results show that generated trajectories improve GUI-agent performance on real desktop and scientific tasks.
While GUI agents have shown impressive capabilities in common computer-use tasks such as OSWorld, current benchmarks mainly focus on isolated and single-application tasks. This overlooks a critical real-world requirement of coordinating across multiple applications to accomplish complex profession-specific workflows. To bridge this gap, we present a computer-use benchmark in cross-application workflows, named WindowsWorld, designed to systematically assess GUI Agents on complex multi-step tasks that mirror real-world professional activities. Our methodology uses a multi-agent framework steered by 16 occupations to generate four difficulty-level tasks with intermediate inspection, which are then refined by human review and executed in a simulated environment. The resulting benchmark contains 181 tasks with an average of 5.0 sub-goals across 17 common desktop applications, of which 78% are inherently multi-application. Experimental results of leading large models and agents show that: 1) All computer-use agents perform poorly on multi-application tasks (< 21% success rate), far below the performance of simple single-app tasks; 2) They largely fail at tasks requiring conditional judgment and reasoning across ≥ 3 applications, stalling at early sub-goals; 3) Low execution efficiency, where tasks often fail despite far exceeding human step limits. Code, benchmark data, and evaluation resources are available at github.com/HITsz-TMG/WindowsWorld.
Jinchao Li, Yunxin Li, Chenrui Zhao +3
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen · Shenzhen Loop Area Institute