arXiv AI By Vasundra Srinivasan

What Does "Now" Mean to Your Computer-Use Agent? Stale Screenshots, Page Loads, and Which Check to Run Before a Click

Read the original on arXiv AI →

The paper investigates how stale screenshots can cause computer‑use agents to click on unintended elements. By measuring 31 public web pages, it shows that most stale clicks occur during page loading, with a 17% risk in the first second after a page opens versus only 0.4% after full load. The authors propose that waiting for network activity to stop and performing a pixel‑comparison check before a click can mitigate this risk, and they release a benchmark generator and guidelines for developers.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

When 200 OK Is Not an Answer: Silent Fetch Failures in Agentic Web Content Acquisition

The study investigates how often web agents incorrectly treat an HTTP 200 response as a successful fetch of useful content. By sampling 10,307 URLs—including random paths and expert‑verified claim citations—the authors found that roughly 20–25% of 200 responses lack the page’s main content, leading to inflated estimates of claim verifiability and citation drift. They propose simple heuristics and classifiers to detect unusable responses, achieving high recall with low false‑alarm rates, and recommend that agents report fetch outcomes explicitly.

By Shuyang Zhang (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)