Autonomous Continual Learning for Environment Adaptation of Computer-Use Agents

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Authors: Tianci Xue, Zeyi Liao, Tianneng Shi, Zilu Wang, Kai Zhang, Dawn Song, Yu Su, Huan Sun
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Real-world digital environments are highly diverse and dynamic. These characteristics cause agents to frequently encounter unseen environments and distribution shifts, making continual learning in such environments essential for computer-use agents (CUAs). However, a key challenge lies in obtaining high-quality and environment-grounded training data without relying on costly human annotation. In this work, we introduce ACuRL, an Autonomous Curriculum Reinforcement Learning framework that continually adapts agents to specific environments with zero human data. The agent first explores an environment to acquire initial experiences. During subsequent iterative training, a curriculum task generator leverages these experiences together with feedback from the previous iteration to synthesize new tasks tailored for the agent's current capabilities. To provide reliable reward signals, we introduce CUAJudge, a robust automatic evaluator for CUAs that achieves 93% agreement with human judgments. Empirically, our method effectively enables both intra-environment and cross-environment continual learning, yielding 3-29% absolute performance gains on the target environments without catastrophic forgetting on others. We also show that it can mitigate performance degradation under environment changes (e.g., version updates, platform migration, and resolution shifts). Further analyses show highly sparse updates (e.g., only 20% parameters), which helps explain the effective and robust adaptation.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning Reinforcement Learning in Robotics AI-based Problem Solving and Planning

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
10 February 2026
Language
EN
Document type
Preprint