Hybrid Self-evolving Structured Memory for Computer-Use Agents

Sibo Zhu, Wenyi WU, Kun Zhou, Stephen Wang, Biwei Huang


Abstract
The remarkable progress of vision–language models (VLMs) has enabled computer-use agents to interact with computers in a human-like manner. Yet real-world computer-use tasks remain difficult due to long-horizon workflows, diverse interfaces, and frequent intermediate errors. Prior work equips agents with external memory built from large collections of trajectories, but relies on flat retrieval over discrete summaries or continuous embeddings, falling short of the structured organization and self-evolving characteristics of human memory. Inspired by the brain, we propose Hybrid Self-evolving Structured Memory (HyMEM), a graph-based memory that couples discrete high-level symbolic nodes with continuous trajectory embeddings. HyMEM maintains a graph structure to support multi-hop retrieval, self-evolution via node update operations, and on-the-fly working-memory refreshing during inference. Extensive experiments show that HyMEM consistently improves open-source computer-use agents, enabling 7B/8B backbones to match or surpass strong closed-source models; notably, it boosts Qwen2.5-VL-7B by +22.5% and outperforms Gemini2.5-Pro-Vision and GPT-4o.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.549
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
11287–11304
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.549/
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Cite (ACL):
Sibo Zhu, Wenyi WU, Kun Zhou, Stephen Wang, and Biwei Huang. 2026. Hybrid Self-evolving Structured Memory for Computer-Use Agents. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 11287–11304, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Hybrid Self-evolving Structured Memory for Computer-Use Agents (Zhu et al., Findings 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.549.pdf
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