Microsoft has introduced Fara-7B, a new 7-billion parameter model designed to act as a Computer Use Agent (CUA) capable of performing complex tasks directly on a user’s device. Fara-7B sets new state-of-the-art results for its size, providing a way to build AI agents that don’t rely on massive, cloud-dependent models and can run on compact systems with lower latency and enhanced privacy.
While the model is an experimental release, its architecture addresses a primary barrier to enterprise adoption: data security. Because Fara-7B is small enough to run locally, it allows users to automate sensitive workflows, such as managing internal accounts or processing sensitive company data, without that information ever leaving the device.
How Fara-7B sees the web
Fara-7B is designed to navigate user interfaces using the same tools a human does: a mouse and keyboard. The model operates by visually perceiving a web page through screenshots and predicting specific coordinates for actions like clicking, typing, and scrolling.
Crucially, Fara-7B does not rely on „accessibility trees,” the underlying code structure that browsers use to describe web pages to screen readers. Instead, it relies solely on pixel-level visual data. This approach allows the agent to interact with websites even when the underlying code is obfuscated or complex.
According to Yash Lara, Senior PM Lead at Microsoft Research, processing all visual input on-device creates true „pixel sovereignty,“ since screenshots and the reasoning needed for automation remain on the user’s device. „This approach helps organizations meet strict requirements in regulated sectors, including HIPAA and GLBA,“ he told VentureBeat in written comments.
In benchmarking tests, this visual-first approach has yielded strong results. On WebVoyager, a standard benchmark for web agents, Fara-7B achieved a task success rate of 73.5%. This outperforms larger, more resource-intensive systems, including GPT-4o, when prompted to act as a computer use agent (65.1%) and the native UI-TARS-1.5-7B model (66.4%).
Efficiency is another key differentiator. In comparative tests, Fara-7B completed tasks in approximately 16 steps on average, compared to roughly 41 steps for the UI-TARS-1.5-7B model.
Handling risks
The transition to autonomous agents is not without risks, however. Microsoft notes that Fara-7B shares limitations common to other AI models, including potential hallucinations, mistakes in following complex instructions, and accuracy degradation on intricate tasks.
To mitigate these risks, the model was trained to recognize „Critical Points.“ A Critical Point is defined as any situation requiring a user’s personal data or consent before an irreversible action occurs, such as sending an email or completing a financial transaction. Upon reaching such a juncture, Fara-7B is designed to pause and explicitly request user approval before proceeding.
Managing this interaction without frustrating the user is a key design challenge. „Balancing robust safeguards such as Critical Points with seamless user journeys is key,“ Lara said. „Having a UI, like Microsoft Research’s Magentic-UI, is vital for giving users opportunities to intervene when necessary, while also helping to avoid approval fatigue.“ Magentic-UI is a research prototype designed specifically to facilitate these human-agent interactions. Fara-7B is designed to run in Magentic-UI.
Distilling complexity into a single model
The development of Fara-7B highlights a growing trend in knowledge distillation, where the capabilities of a complex system are compressed into a smaller, more efficient model.
Creating a CUA usually requires massive amounts of training data showing how to navigate the web. Collecting this data via human annotation is prohibitively expensive. To solve this, Microsoft used a synthetic data pipeline built on Magentic-One, a multi-agent framework. In this setup, an „Orchestrator“ agent created plans and directed a „WebSurfer“ agent to browse the web, generating 145,000 successful task trajectories.
The researchers then „distilled“ this complex interaction data into Fara-7B, which is built on Qwen2.5-VL-7B, a base model chosen for its long context window (up to 128,000 tokens) and its strong ability to connect text instructions to visual elements on a screen. While the data generation required a heavy multi-agent system, Fara-7B itself is a single model, showing that a small model can effectively learn advanced behaviors without needing complex scaffolding at runtime.
The training process relied on supervised fine-tuning, where the model learns by mimicking the successful examples generated by the synthetic pipeline.
Looking forward
While the current version was trained on static datasets, future iterations will focus on making the model smarter, not necessarily bigger. „Moving forward, we’ll strive to maintain the small size of our models,“ Lara said. „Our ongoing research is focused on making agentic models smarter and safer, not just larger.“ This includes exploring techniques like reinforcement learning (RL) in live, sandboxed environments, which would allow the model to learn from trial and error in real-time.
Microsoft has made the model available on Hugging Face and Microsoft Foundry under an MIT license. However, Lara cautions that while the license allows for commercial use, the model is not yet production-ready. „You can freely experiment and prototype with Fara‑7B under the MIT license,“ he says, „but it’s best suited for pilots and proofs‑of‑concept rather than mission‑critical deployments.“
