On the Reliability of Computer Use Agents
Computer-use agents have rapidly improved on real-world tasks such as web navigation, desktop automation, and software interaction, in some cases surpassing human performance. Yet even when the task and model are unchanged, an agent that succeeds once may fail on a repeated execution of the same task. This raises a fundamental question: if an agent can succeed at a task once, what prevents it from doing so reliably? In this work, we study the sources of unreliability in computer-use agents through three factors: stochasticity during execution, ambiguity in task specification, and variability in agent behavior. We analyze these factors on OSWorld using repeated executions of the same task ...
| Authors | Gonzalo Gonzalez-Pumariega, Saaket Agashe, Jiachen Yang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 20 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 April 2026 |
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