ComputerSD: Online Self-Distillation from Real-Time Feedback for Computer-Use Agents
2609.40253

Authors

Wenhao Xu,Yongliang Shen,Yong Du,Tongbo Chen,Zhengxi Lu

Abstract

Online training enables computer-use agents (CUAs) to improve through interaction with executable environments. However, existing methods primarily rely on sparse outcome rewards, which provide no supervision for intermediate actions.

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) offers token-level learning signals through privileged rescoring, but directly applying it to CUA online training presents two challenges: fixed guidance may become misaligned with the student's current state, and guidance-induced probability shifts may conflict with step-level correctness. We introduce ComputerSD, an online self-distillation method for CUAs that converts real-time feedback from executed GUI transitions into guidance for policy learning.

A fine-tuned GUI analyzer produces guidance and a step-level value score after each action; the guidance provides privileged context, while the score regulates the resulting OPSD signals. ComputerSD jointly optimizes token-level OPSD and trajectory-level GRPO in a fully asynchronous training framework.

On OSWorld-Verified, ComputerSD outperforms outcome-only GRPO by 1.9 and 4.1 percentage points on the general-purpose Qwen3-VL-8B-Thinking and specialized EvoCUA-8B backbones, respectively. Evaluation in out-of-distribution settings further supports the generalizability of ComputerSD.

These results demonstrate the effectiveness of learning from real-time feedback through online self-distillation for CUAs.

Resources

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