Boosting Virtual Agent Learning and Reasoning: A Step-Wise, Multi-Dimensional, and Generalist Reward Model with Benchmark

Abstract

The development of Generalist Virtual Agents (GVAs) has shown significant promise in autonomous task execution. However, current training paradigms face critical limitations, including reliance on outcome supervision and labor-intensive human annotations. To address these challenges, we propose Similar, a step-wise multi-dimensional generalist reward model, which offers fine-grained signals for agent training and can choose better actions for inference-time scaling. Specifically, we begin by systematically defining five dimensions for evaluating agent actions. Building on this framework, we design an MCTS-P algorithm to automatically collect and annotate step-wise, five-dimensional agent execution data. Using this data, we train Similar with our crafted Triple-M strategy. Furthermore, we introduce the first benchmark in the virtual agent domain for step-wise, multi-dimensional reward model training and evaluation, named SRM. This benchmark consists of two components: SRMTrain, which serves as the training set for Similar, and SRMEval, a manually selected test set for evaluating the reward model. Experimental results demonstrate that Similar, through its step-wise, multi-dimensional assessment and synergistic gain, provides GVAs with effective intermediate signals during both training and inference-time scaling. The code is available at https://github.com/antgroup/Similar.

Cite

Text

Miao et al. "Boosting Virtual Agent Learning and Reasoning: A Step-Wise, Multi-Dimensional, and Generalist Reward Model with Benchmark." Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning, 2025.

Markdown

[Miao et al. "Boosting Virtual Agent Learning and Reasoning: A Step-Wise, Multi-Dimensional, and Generalist Reward Model with Benchmark." Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning, 2025.](https://mlanthology.org/icml/2025/miao2025icml-boosting/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{miao2025icml-boosting,
  title     = {{Boosting Virtual Agent Learning and Reasoning: A Step-Wise, Multi-Dimensional, and Generalist Reward Model with Benchmark}},
  author    = {Miao, Bingchen and Wu, Yang and Gao, Minghe and Yu, Qifan and Bu, Wendong and Zhang, Wenqiao and Li, Yunfei and Tang, Siliang and Chua, Tat-Seng and Li, Juncheng},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning},
  year      = {2025},
  pages     = {44054-44075},
  volume    = {267},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/icml/2025/miao2025icml-boosting/}
}