mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

MobileRL: Online Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Mobile GUI Agents

arXiv 2509.18119 ↗First posted 10 Sep 2025cs.LG cs.AIcited by 43

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → GUI and mobile agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Building general-purpose graphical user interface (GUI) agents has become increasingly promising with the progress in vision language models. However, developing effective mobile GUI agents with reinforcement learning (RL) remains challenging due to the heavy-tailed distribution of task difficulty and the inefficiency of large-scale environment sampling. We present an online agentic reinforcement learning framework MobileRL to enhance GUI agents in mobile environments. Its core component is the Difficulty-ADAptive GRPO (ADAGRPO) algorithm. In ADAGRPO, we design difficulty-adaptive positive replay and failure curriculum filtering to adapt the model to different task difficulties. We introduce the shortest-path reward adjustment strategy to reshape rewards concerning the task length in multi-turn agentic tasks. Those strategies jointly stabilize RL training, improve sample efficiency, and generate strong performance across diverse mobile apps and tasks. We apply MOBILERL to two open models (Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct and GLM-4.1V-9B-Base). The resultant MOBILERL-9B model achieves state-of-the-art results in terms of success rates on both AndroidWorld (80.2%) and AndroidLab (53.6%). The MOBILERL framework is open-sourced at: https://github.com/THUDM/MobileRL.

Key facts. Cited by 43 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in GUI and mobile agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 25 of its 31 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Sep 2025.

Builds on

25 of 31 references.

Closest ancestors · 15

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025ComputerRL: Scaling End-to-End Online Reinforcement Learning for Computer Use Agents19 Aug
  2. 2025UI-AGILE: Advancing GUI Agents with Effective Reinforcement Learning and Precise Inference-Time Grounding29 Jul
  3. 2025UI-Genie: A Self-Improving Approach for Iteratively Boosting MLLM-based Mobile GUI Agents27 May
  4. 2025AndroidGen: Building an Android Language Agent under Data Scarcity27 Apr
  5. 2025GUI-R1 : A Generalist R1-Style Vision-Language Action Model For GUI Agents14 Apr
  6. 2025Agent S2: A Compositional Generalist-Specialist Framework for Computer Use Agents1 Apr
  7. 2025UI-R1: Enhancing Efficient Action Prediction of GUI Agents by Reinforcement Learning27 Mar
  8. 2025Advancing Mobile GUI Agents: A Verifier-Driven Approach to Practical Deployment20 Mar
  9. 2024AutoDroid-V2: Boosting SLM-based GUI Agents via Code Generation24 Dec
  10. 2024AndroidLab: Training and Systematic Benchmarking of Android Autonomous Agents31 Oct
  11. 2024Mobile-Bench: An Evaluation Benchmark for LLM-based Mobile Agents1 Jul
  12. 2024MobileAgentBench: An Efficient and User-Friendly Benchmark for Mobile LLM Agents12 Jun
3 more
  1. 2024Benchmarking Mobile Device Control Agents across Diverse Configurations25 Apr
  2. 2023AppAgent: Multimodal Agents as Smartphone Users21 Dec
  3. 2023CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agents14 Dec

Other references · 10

  1. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 15,215
  2. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
  3. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,587
  4. 2024HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Frameworkcited by 2,057
  5. 2020Curriculum Learning for Reinforcement Learning Domains: A Framework and Surveycited by 373
  6. 2023Android in the Wild: A Large-Scale Dataset for Android Device Controlcited by 319
  7. 2017Teacher-Student Curriculum Learningcited by 210
  8. 2021AndroidEnv: A Reinforcement Learning Platform for Androidcited by 90
  9. 2025T1: Advancing Language Model Reasoning through Reinforcement Learning and Inference Scalingcited by 77
  10. 2021Mitigating Covariate Shift in Imitation Learning via Offline Data Without Great Coveragecited by 26

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 8; 2026: 35.

43 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2025Step-GUI Technical Reportcited by 39
  2. 2026Single-Rollout Asynchronous Optimization for Agentic Reinforcement Learningcited by 37
  3. 2025A Survey on Agentic Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 23
  4. 2026GUI-GENESIS: Automated Synthesis of Efficient Environments with Verifiable Rewards for GUI Agent Post-Trainingcited by 18
  5. 2026CompactionRL: Reinforcement Learning with Context Compaction for Long-Horizon Agentscited by 14
  6. 2025GhostEI-Bench: Do Mobile Agents Resilience to Environmental Injection in Dynamic On-Device Environments?cited by 12
  7. 2026UI-Mem: Self-Evolving Experience Memory for Online Reinforcement Learning in Mobile GUI Agentscited by 12
  8. 2025ProRe: A Proactive Reward System for GUI Agents via Reasoner-Actor Collaborationcited by 11
  9. 2025AgentProg: Empowering Long-Horizon GUI Agents with Program-Guided Context Managementcited by 11
  10. 2026UI-Voyager: A Self-Evolving GUI Agent Learning via Failed Experiencecited by 11
  11. 2026Learn where to Click from Yourself: On-Policy Self-Distillation for GUI Groundingcited by 11
  12. 2026ToolCUA: Towards Optimal GUI-Tool Path Orchestration for Computer Use Agentscited by 11
31 more
  1. 2026OpAgent: Operator Agent for Web Navigationcited by 8
  2. 2026CORA: Conformal Risk-Controlled Agents for Safeguarded Mobile GUI Automationcited by 7
  3. 2026SCALECUA: Scaling Computer Use Agents with Verifiable Task Synthesis and Efficient Online RLcited by 7
  4. 2026Agent-Dice: Disentangling Knowledge Updates via Geometric Consensus for Agent Continual Learningcited by 6
  5. 2026UI-Oceanus: Scaling GUI Agents with Synthetic Environmental Dynamicscited by 5
  6. 2026VenusBench-Mobile: A Challenging and User-Centric Benchmark for Mobile GUI Agents with Capability Diagnosticscited by 5
  7. 2026What Memory Do GUI Agents Really Need? From Passive Records to Active Task-Driving Statescited by 5
  8. 2025OpenPhone: Mobile Agentic Foundation Modelscited by 4
  9. 2026Agentic Reward Modeling: Verifying GUI Agent via Progressive Trajectory-Grounded Interactioncited by 4
  10. 2026BeSafe-Bench: Unveiling Behavioral Safety Risks of Situated Agents in Functional Environmentscited by 4
  11. 2026HyMobileAgent: Data-Environment Co-Scaling for Efficient GUI Agentscited by 4
  12. 2025SmartSnap: Proactive Evidence Seeking for Self-Verifying Agentscited by 3
  13. 2026GUI Agents with Reinforcement Learning: Toward Digital Inhabitantscited by 3
  14. 2026EvoCUA-1.5: Online Reinforcement Learning for Multi-turn Computer-Use Agentscited by 3
  15. 2026ScaleWoB: Guiding GUI Agents with Coding Agents via Large-Scale Environmental Synthesiscited by 2
  16. 2026PAGER: Bridging the Semantic-Execution Gap in Point-Precise Geometric GUI Controlcited by 1
  17. 2026PhoneWorld: From Real-App Trajectories to Dynamic and Verifiable Environments for Phone-Use Agentscited by 1
  18. 2026LabOSBench: Benchmarking Computer Use Agents for Scientific Instrument Controlcited by 1
  19. 2026Software Engineering for and with GUI Agentcited by 1
  20. 2026Benchmarking LLM Judges for Mobile Agent Evaluationcited by 1
  21. 2026CoAdapt-GUI: Joint Workflow Context and Policy Adaptation for Unseen GUI Applicationscited by 1
  22. 2025Measuring the Security of Mobile LLM Agents under Adversarial Prompts from Untrusted Third-Party Channelscited by 0
  23. 2026OS-SPEAR: A Toolkit for the Safety, Performance,Efficiency, and Robustness Analysis of OS Agentscited by 0
  24. 2026Beyond the GUI Paradigm: Do Mobile Agents Need the Phone Screen?cited by 0
  25. 2026GUICrafter: Weakly-Supervised GUI Agent Leveraging Massive Unannotated Screenshotscited by 0
  26. 2026AISE-Bench: A Full-Cycle Curated Benchmark for Information Seeking on Academic Knowledge Graphscited by 0
  27. 2026WM-R1: Training GUI Agents to Reason and leverage World Models with Reinforcement Learningcited by 0
  28. 2026Learning from Reliable Negatives: Confidence-Anchored Test-Time Adaptation for GUI Groundingcited by 0
  29. 2026Learn How to Act from Your Own Interactions: On-Policy Self-Distillation for GUI Agentscited by 0
  30. 2026Qwen-Planner-Agent: A Closed-Loop AI-for-AI Framework for Real-World Mobile Planner Agentscited by 0
  31. 2026PhoneCLI: From App Interfaces to Callable Commands for Mobile Agentscited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025MobileGUI-RL: Advancing Mobile GUI Agent through Reinforcement Learning in Online Environment
  2. 2025ARPO:End-to-End Policy Optimization for GUI Agents with Experience Replay
  3. 2025CRAFT-GUI: Curriculum-Reinforced Agent For GUI Tasks
  4. 2026Generalization in Online Reinforcement Learning for Mobile Agents
  5. 2026GSAR: Goal-State-Anchor Rewards for Mobile GUI Agents with Self-Evolving Data Synthesis
  6. 2025Mobile-R1: Towards Interactive Capability for VLM-Based Mobile Agent via Systematic Training
  7. 2026MobileForge: Annotation-Free Adaptation for Mobile GUI Agents with Hierarchical Feedback-Guided Policy Optimization
  8. 2025AgentCPM-GUI: Building Mobile-Use Agents with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning