Skip to content
OpenTrain AIFor AI Companies

HFEPX · Eval paper review

Watch and Learn: Learning to Use Computers from Online Videos

Chan Hee Song, Yiwen Song, Palash Goyal, Yu Su +3 more

Published

Oct 6, 2025

Citations

0

Trust level

Moderate

Usefulness score

50/100 (Medium)

Extraction confidence

60% (Moderate)

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Rater population

Not reported

Signals refreshed

Mar 16, 2026

Should you rely on this paper?

This paper has useful evaluation signal, but protocol completeness is partial; pair it with related papers before deciding implementation strategy.

Use this for comparison and orientation, not as your only source.

Best use

Secondary protocol comparison source

Use if you need

A secondary eval reference to pair with stronger protocol papers.

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Main weakness

No major weakness surfaced.

Human feedback signal
Detected
From extracted signals
Evaluation signal
Detected
Eval setup described
Usefulness for eval research
50/100
Moderate-confidence candidate

Useful as a secondary reference; validate protocol details against neighboring papers.

Abstract

Computer-using agents (CUAs) must plan task workflows across diverse and evolving applications, yet progress is limited by the lack of large-scale, high-quality training data. Existing datasets are narrow, static, and costly to annotate, while synthetic data often yields oversimplified or misaligned behaviors. We present Watch & Learn (W&L), a framework that converts readily available Internet videos of human computer use into executable UI trajectories at scale. Instead of directly generating actions or relying on handcrafted heuristics, we cast trajectory annotation as an inverse dynamics problem that predicts user actions from consecutive screen states, which simplifies learning and generalizes across domains. Through a task-aware retrieval and labeling pipeline, W&L yields over 53K high-quality trajectories that enhance CUAs both as in-context exemplars and as supervised training data. On OSWorld, it consistently improves general-purpose and specialized CUAs, while on WindowsAgentArena it achieves state-of-the-art performance among 7B-scale models under the 15-step limit. These results show that web-scale human demonstration videos can serve as a practical and scalable foundation for advancing real-world CUAs.

What we could verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

strong

Demonstrations

Directly usable for protocol triage.

"Computer-using agents (CUAs) must plan task workflows across diverse and evolving applications, yet progress is limited by the lack of large-scale, high-quality training data."

Evaluation Modes

missing

None explicit

Validate eval design from full paper text.

"Computer-using agents (CUAs) must plan task workflows across diverse and evolving applications, yet progress is limited by the lack of large-scale, high-quality training data."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"Computer-using agents (CUAs) must plan task workflows across diverse and evolving applications, yet progress is limited by the lack of large-scale, high-quality training data."

Benchmarks / Datasets

strong

OSWorld, Windowsagentarena

Useful for quick benchmark comparison.

"On OSWorld, it consistently improves general-purpose and specialized CUAs, while on WindowsAgentArena it achieves state-of-the-art performance among 7B-scale models under the 15-step limit."

Reported Metrics

missing

Not extracted

No metric anchors detected.

"Computer-using agents (CUAs) must plan task workflows across diverse and evolving applications, yet progress is limited by the lack of large-scale, high-quality training data."

Benchmarks and datasets

OSWorldWindowsagentarena

Reported metrics

No metric terms were extracted from the available abstract.

Human feedback details
Uses human feedback
Yes
Feedback types
Demonstrations
Rater population
Not reported
Unit of annotation
Trajectory
Expertise required
General
Evaluation details
Evaluation modes
None
Agentic eval
Long Horizon
Quality controls
Not reported
Evidence quality
Moderate
Use this page as
Secondary protocol comparison source

Research brief

Metadata summary

Computer-using agents (CUAs) must plan task workflows across diverse and evolving applications, yet progress is limited by the lack of large-scale, high-quality training data.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key takeaways

  • Computer-using agents (CUAs) must plan task workflows across diverse and evolving applications, yet progress is limited by the lack of large-scale, high-quality training data.
  • Existing datasets are narrow, static, and costly to annotate, while synthetic data often yields oversimplified or misaligned behaviors.
  • We present Watch & Learn (W&L), a framework that converts readily available Internet videos of human computer use into executable UI trajectories at scale.

Researcher actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Check the full text for explicit evaluation design choices (raters, protocol, and metrics).
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Contribution summary

  • Computer-using agents (CUAs) must plan task workflows across diverse and evolving applications, yet progress is limited by the lack of large-scale, high-quality training data.
  • We present Watch & Learn (W&L), a framework that converts readily available Internet videos of human computer use into executable UI trajectories at scale.
  • On OSWorld, it consistently improves general-purpose and specialized CUAs, while on WindowsAgentArena it achieves state-of-the-art performance among 7B-scale models under the 15-step limit.

Why it matters for eval

  • Computer-using agents (CUAs) must plan task workflows across diverse and evolving applications, yet progress is limited by the lack of large-scale, high-quality training data.
  • We present Watch & Learn (W&L), a framework that converts readily available Internet videos of human computer use into executable UI trajectories at scale.

Researcher checklist

  • Human feedback protocol is explicit

    Detected: Demonstrations

  • Evaluation mode is explicit

    No clear evaluation mode extracted.

  • Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    Detected: OSWorld, Windowsagentarena

  • Metric reporting is present

    No metric terms extracted.