mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Learning UI Navigation through Demonstrations composed of Macro Actions

arXiv 2110.08653 ↗First posted 16 Oct 2021cs.AIcited by 6

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Abstract (arXiv)

We have developed a framework to reliably build agents capable of UI navigation. The state space is simplified from raw-pixels to a set of UI elements extracted from screen understanding, such as OCR and icon detection. The action space is restricted to the UI elements plus a few global actions. Actions can be customized for tasks and each action is a sequence of basic operations conditioned on status checks. With such a design, we are able to train DQfD and BC agents with a small number of demonstration episodes. We propose demo augmentation that significantly reduces the required number of human demonstrations. We made a customization of DQfD to allow demos collected on screenshots to facilitate the demo coverage of rare cases. Demos are only collected for the failed cases during the evaluation of the previous version of the agent. With 10s of iterations looping over evaluation, demo collection, and training, the agent reaches a 98.7% success rate on the search task in an environment of 80+ apps and websites where initial states and viewing parameters are randomized.

Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 7 of its 11 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2021.

Builds on

7 of 11 references.

References · 7

  1. 2018An Algorithmic Perspective on Imitation Learningcited by 455
  2. 2018Reinforcement Learning on Web Interfaces Using Workflow-Guided Explorationcited by 282
  3. 2020Mapping Natural Language Instructions to Mobile UI Action Sequencescited by 180
  4. 2021AndroidEnv: A Reinforcement Learning Platform for Androidcited by 90
  5. 2018Learning to Navigate the Webcited by 60
  6. 2017Deep Q-learning from Demonstrationscited by 27
  7. 2021Adversarial Environment Generation for Learning to Navigate the Webcited by 13

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Cited by year

Citing papers per year: 2022: 1; 2023: 1; 2024: 2; 2025: 2.

6 papers.