CUA-Universe: A Scalable and Dynamic Environment for Hybrid GUI+CLI Agents
Researchers introduce CUA-Universe, a pipeline turning real desktop software into hybrid GUI+CLI agent environments, lifting a 9B model's OSWorld success rate.
CUA-Universe is an environment-to-data pipeline that converts real desktop applications into hybrid GUI+CLI environments, scaling to 16 applications via App-Forge, Task-Weave, and Path-Steer. Training on its harvested trajectories shifted a 9B model toward effective GUI+CLI orchestration, yielding +39.3 points on CUA-Verse, +16.8 points success rate on OSWorld, and +7.84 points on OSWorld-MCP while cutting steps and tokens by up to 57% and 60%. The work addresses the scarcity of scalable hybrid environments for computer-use agents.
- Pipeline scales to 16 real applications with discovered or generated CLI surfaces
- 9B model improves on CUA-Verse, OSWorld, and OSWorld-MCP benchmarks
- Path-Steer harvests verified hybrid trajectories for post-training
- Cuts steps up to 57% and tokens up to 60% versus baselines
Full article227 words · extracted from arxiv.org · click to collapse
Computer-use agents have advanced on benchmarks like OSWorld and AndroidWorld, but still act mostly through the GUI, often producing inefficient trajectories. Real-world computer work is hybrid, combining visual-state inspection with precise, high-throughput command-line operations, so capable agents must coordinate both modalities over shared application state. Yet scalable hybrid environments remain scarce because supporting both GUI and CLI over real applications typically requires substantial manual engineering for each application. Existing agents also struggle to use the two interfaces complementarily: CLI-native agents lack visual perception for tasks involving interface state or layout, while GUI-native agents are inefficient for operations better executed through commands. We introduce CUA-Universe, a scalable environment-to-data pipeline that turns real desktop software into hybrid GUI+CLI environments. App-Forge adapts applications into reproducible VMs and command-line surfaces it discovers, wraps, or generates, scaling to 16 applications; Task-Weave synthesizes diverse hybrid tasks of controllable difficulty from reusable operations over seed files; and Path-Steer steers rollouts along efficient hybrid paths and harvests verified trajectories for post-training. Training on this data shifts behavior from inefficient GUI interaction and brittle CLI scripting toward effective GUI+CLI orchestration. Our 9B model improves both success and efficiency on CUA-Verse (Score +39.3 pts; -37% steps, -60% tokens), OSWorld (SR +16.8 pts; -57% steps, -44% tokens), and OSWorld-MCP (Score +7.84 pts; -27% steps, -30% tokens). CUA-Universe provides a scalable path toward more capable and efficient computer-use agents.
Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05374