Learning UI Navigation through Demonstrations composed of Macro Actions
Not on the map. Why?
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
- 2018An Algorithmic Perspective on Imitation Learningcited by 455
- 2018Reinforcement Learning on Web Interfaces Using Workflow-Guided Explorationcited by 282
- 2020Mapping Natural Language Instructions to Mobile UI Action Sequencescited by 180
- 2021AndroidEnv: A Reinforcement Learning Platform for Androidcited by 90
- 2018Learning to Navigate the Webcited by 60
- 2017Deep Q-learning from Demonstrationscited by 27
- 2021Adversarial Environment Generation for Learning to Navigate the Webcited by 13
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2022: 1; 2023: 1; 2024: 2; 2025: 2.
6 papers.
- 2025A Comprehensive Survey of Agents for Computer Use: Foundations, Challenges, and Future Directionscited by 33
- 2022UGIF: UI Grounded Instruction Followingcited by 25
- 2025MobileSteward: Integrating Multiple App-Oriented Agents with Self-Evolution to Automate Cross-App Instructionscited by 16
- 2024E-ANT: A Large-Scale Dataset for Efficient Automatic GUI NavigaTioncited by 11
- 2024Parameter Efficient Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedbackcited by 7
- 2023UINav: A Practical Approach to Train On-Device Automation Agentscited by 5
- 2025MobileSteward: Integrating Multiple App-Oriented Agents with Self-Evolution to Automate Cross-App Instructions24 Feb 2025
- 2025A Comprehensive Survey of Agents for Computer Use: Foundations, Challenges, and Future Directions27 Jan 2025
- 2024E-ANT: A Large-Scale Dataset for Efficient Automatic GUI NavigaTion20 Jun 2024
- 2024Parameter Efficient Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback15 Mar 2024
- 2023UINav: A Practical Approach to Train On-Device Automation Agents15 Dec 2023
- 2022UGIF: UI Grounded Instruction Following14 Nov 2022