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#machine learning Preprint Open access

NorthCUA Technical Report: Turbocharging Computer-Use Agents through Experience at Scale

Chaoyun Zhang Bingxuan Li Pinxue Guo Yangfan Gao Zikun Cai Tianci Xie Hui Li Yuqi Huang Yifei Cao Bo Mao Tian Tang Qichang Zheng Tongtong Liu Xiaoxing Wang Jinxiu Liu Lizhi Lin Zhou Shao Maosen Zhou Miao Zheng Shuo Zhang Yangji He Kepeng Lei Ning Zhao Wei Shen Zhenjiang Jin Xinyue Zhang Peng Sun Zhenhua Han Rui Zheng Hang Yan
Nov 2026
Machine Learning

Abstract

Scaling computer-use agents from individual actions to complex software work requires experience that connects decisions to complete outcomes. We present NorthCUA, an integrated system for turbocharging computer-use agents through experience at scale. Its Experience Flywheel supplies diverse executable tasks to the NorthCUA Harness, which sustains long interactions, records decisions, and checks task outcomes. The Flywheel uses these records to curate verified trajectories. For unsolved tasks, recursive self-improvement evolves reusable skills and preserves verified milestones so later attempts build on earlier progress. Staged Learning combines this experience with grounding data from the Flywheel to develop GUI competence through mid-training and long-horizon supervised fine-tuning. The policy then learns from fresh attempts in the same Harness through joint desktop-web reinforcement learning, closing the loop between experience production and policy improvement. The resulting Nano, Mini, and Pro family achieves state-of-the-art results among open-source models across GUI grounding, desktop execution, and Web interaction under the reported evaluation settings. For more responsive Web workflows, NorthCUA-Ultrafast pairs direct action selection with open-ended generation on pre-RL Nano, offering a measured quality-latency tradeoff. Together, these advances establish NorthCUA as a high-performing model family and a reusable foundation for agents that carry complex software work from intent to completion.

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