本地运行的智能代理性能提升受限,额外计算未必有效。
Rethinking Inference-Time Scaling in Local Computer-Use Agents: Failure Modes and Compute Tradeoffs

- 通过上下文、时间、结构、并行四维度测试推理时扩展效果
- 增加计算量收益递减,失败模式从卡顿转为过早误成功
- 适合关注本地部署智能体优化的开发者与研究者
将自主计算机使用代理(CUAs)本地部署对隐私、成本效率和实用性至关重要,但在严格硬件限制下提升性能仍具挑战。尽管近期研究表明推理时扩展可通过执行中增加计算改善前沿代理表现,但其在资源受限本地模型中的有效性尚不明确。本文系统评估了在上下文、时间、结构和并行四个维度上推理时扩展在本地CUAs中的表现,测试了Qwen3-VL-8B/30B-A3B、UI-TARS-1.5-7B和OpenCUA-7B在OSWorld基准上的表现。结果表明,额外计算常导致收益递减,且失败模式发生转变:上下文扩展可提供历史上下文以提升轨迹稳定性和任务准确率,但随着令牌开销增加,性能增益趋于饱和,失败模式由重复或停滞转向提前错误成功;时间扩展虽减少最大步数停滞,但未显著提升任务成功率,说明更长规划窗口往往延长错误轨迹而非修正;结构分解在双阶段本地代理中引入规划与格式化开销,而并行扩展虽部分缓解问题,但需巨大计算成本。总体而言,高效本地CUA需选择性分配算力、具备故障感知控制机制,并设计适配本地模型能力与局限的智能体框架。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Deploying autonomous computer-use agents (CUAs) locally is increasingly important for privacy, cost efficiency, and practical usability, yet improving their performance under strict hardware constraints remains challenging. While recent studies show that inference-time scaling can improve frontier computer-use agents through additional computation during execution, its effectiveness for resource-constrained local models remains poorly understood. We present a systematic empirical study of inference-time scaling in local CUAs across contextual, temporal, structural, and parallel dimensions. We evaluate Qwen3-VL-8B/30B-A3B, UI-TARS-1.5-7B, and OpenCUA-7B on the OSWorld benchmark. Our results show that additional computation often yields diminishing returns while changing failure modes. Contextual scaling provides historical grounding that improves trajectory stability and task accuracy, but its gains saturate as token cost increases and failures shift from repetitive or stalled trajectories toward premature false successes. Temporal scaling similarly reduces max-step stalls, yet does not substantially improve task success, indicating that longer horizons often extend erroneous trajectories rather than correct them. We further find that structural decomposition can introduce planning and formatting overhead in local two-stage agents, while parallel scaling partially mitigates these failures at a substantial computational cost. Overall, our findings suggest that efficient local CUAs require selective compute allocation, failure-aware control mechanisms, and agentic frameworks designed around the capabilities and limitations of local models.
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