Hybrid Computer Use: A Unified Programmatic, Semantic, and Visual Interface for General Agents

haoqingeric, Xiaoyi Zhang, Sicheng Fan, Zhexin Zhang, Xinjie Zhang, Jiahao Li, Bin Li, Yan Lu

Hybrid Computer Use: A Unified Programmatic, Semantic, and Visual Interface for General Agents: 19 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #12 of 38 papers on 2026-11-05. Day-by-day upvote history.

Upvotes over time

It had 9 upvotes by its first day, 14 upvotes by the next day, 17 upvotes by day 3, 19 upvotes by day 7, and has 19 now. It ranked #72 of 207 papers in its week and #110 of 340 in its month. Its code repository has 51 GitHub stars.

Computer-use agents increasingly tackle tasks ranging from everyday desktop activities to long-horizon professional workflows. Yet interfaces centered on screenshots and mouse-and-keyboard actions can impose a human-interaction prior, requiring repeated screen interpretation while leaving the computer's semantic and programmatic capabilities underexposed. We argue for exposing these capabilities and letting models choose and combine them. We introduce Hybrid Computer Use (HCU), a unified interface for general agents that combines three complementary channels: programmatic interaction through code and command-line tools, semantic interaction through accessibility (AX), and visual interaction through graphical user interfaces (GUI). Our HCU supports efficient AX interaction and guards against stale-state actions during channel switching. A supplementary HCU skill guides agents in selecting and coordinating channels to use the unified interface effectively. Our designed AX tools return compact observations, execute actions in batches, and report their effects as AX diffs, so the model needs fewer round trips. On OSWorld 2.0, HCU achieves the highest Partial and Binary scores among the compared systems. Analyzing agent trajectories, we find that all evaluated models improve with HCU yet allocate work across the channels differently and consistently outperform compared baselines in terms of both efficiency and task success, highlighting the value of unified computer-use interfaces that allow flexible channel selection and combination.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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