English

Video-Based Reward Modeling for Computer-Use Agents

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-03-12 v1 Computation and Language

Abstract

Computer-using agents (CUAs) are becoming increasingly capable; however, it remains difficult to scale evaluation of whether a trajectory truly fulfills a user instruction. In this work, we study reward modeling from execution video: a sequence of keyframes from an agent trajectory that is independent of the agent's internal reasoning or actions. Although video-execution modeling is method-agnostic, it presents key challenges, including highly redundant layouts and subtle, localized cues that determine success. We introduce Execution Video Reward 53k (ExeVR-53k), a dataset of 53k high-quality video--task--reward triplets. We further propose adversarial instruction translation to synthesize negative samples with step-level annotations. To enable learning from long, high-resolution execution videos, we design spatiotemporal token pruning, which removes homogeneous regions and persistent tokens while preserving decisive UI changes. Building on these components, we fine-tune an Execution Video Reward Model (ExeVRM) that takes only a user instruction and a video-execution sequence to predict task success. Our ExeVRM 8B achieves 84.7% accuracy and 87.7% recall on video-execution assessment, outperforming strong proprietary models such as GPT-5.2 and Gemini-3 Pro across Ubuntu, macOS, Windows, and Android, while providing more precise temporal attribution. These results show that video-execution reward modeling can serve as a scalable, model-agnostic evaluator for CUAs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.10178,
  title  = {Video-Based Reward Modeling for Computer-Use Agents},
  author = {Linxin Song and Jieyu Zhang and Huanxin Sheng and Taiwei Shi and Gupta Rahul and Yang Liu and Ranjay Krishna and Jian Kang and Jieyu Zhao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.10178},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:13:47.932Z