AIJan 28

CUA-Skill: Develop Skills for Computer Using Agent

arXiv:2601.21123v115 citations
Originality Incremental advance
AI Analysis

This addresses the challenge of building scalable and reliable agents for real-world computer tasks, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing agentic systems.

The paper tackles the problem of scaling Computer-Using Agents (CUAs) by introducing CUA-Skill, a skill base that encodes human computer-use knowledge, resulting in a state-of-the-art 57.5% success rate on the WindowsAgentArena benchmark.

Computer-Using Agents (CUAs) aim to autonomously operate computer systems to complete real-world tasks. However, existing agentic systems remain difficult to scale and lag behind human performance. A key limitation is the absence of reusable and structured skill abstractions that capture how humans interact with graphical user interfaces and how to leverage these skills. We introduce CUA-Skill, a computer-using agentic skill base that encodes human computer-use knowledge as skills coupled with parameterized execution and composition graphs. CUA-Skill is a large-scale library of carefully engineered skills spanning common Windows applications, serving as a practical infrastructure and tool substrate for scalable, reliable agent development. Built upon this skill base, we construct CUA-Skill Agent, an end-to-end computer-using agent that supports dynamic skill retrieval, argument instantiation, and memory-aware failure recovery. Our results demonstrate that CUA-Skill substantially improves execution success rates and robustness on challenging end-to-end agent benchmarks, establishing a strong foundation for future computer-using agent development. On WindowsAgentArena, CUA-Skill Agent achieves state-of-the-art 57.5% (best of three) successful rate while being significantly more efficient than prior and concurrent approaches. The project page is available at https://microsoft.github.io/cua_skill/.

Foundations

The foundational work for this paper's niche, ranked by how specifically the neighbourhood builds on it — not by global fame.

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