mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

From Off-Policy to On-Policy: Enhancing GUI Agents via Bi-level Expert-to-Policy Assimilation

arXiv 2601.05787 ↗First posted 9 Jan 2026cs.AIcited by 2

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-language models are increasingly deployed as computer-use agents (CUAs) that operate desktops and browsers. Top-performing CUAs are framework-based systems that decompose planning and execution, while end-to-end screenshot-to-action policies are easier to deploy but lag behind on benchmarks such as OSWorld-Verified. GUI datasets like OSWorld pose two bottlenecks: they expose only a few hundred interactive, verifiable tasks and environments, and expert trajectories must be gathered by interacting with these environments, making such data hard to scale. We therefore ask how reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) can best exploit a small pool of exist expert trajectories to train end-to-end policies. Naively mixing these off-policy traces into on-policy RLVR is brittle: even after format conversion, expert trajectories exhibit structural mismatch and distribution shift from the learner. We propose BEPA (Bi-Level Expert-to-Policy Assimilation), which turns static expert traces into policy-aligned guidance via self-rolled reachable trajectories under the base policy (LEVEL-1) and a per-task, dynamically updated cache used in RLVR (LEVEL-2). On OSWorld-Verified, BEPA improves UITARS1.5-7B success from 22.87% to 32.13% and raises a held-out split from 5.74% to 10.30%, with consistent gains on MMBench-GUI and Online-Mind2Web. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/LEON-gittech/Verl_GUI.git

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in GUI and mobile agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 35 of its 46 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Jan 2026.

Builds on

35 of 46 references.

Closest ancestors · 8

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Mobile-Agent-v3: Fundamental Agents for GUI Automation21 Aug
  2. 2025ARPO:End-to-End Policy Optimization for GUI Agents with Experience Replay22 May
  3. 2025UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agents21 Jan
  4. 2024Large Language Model-Brained GUI Agents: A Survey27 Nov
  5. 2024GUI Agents with Foundation Models: A Comprehensive Survey7 Nov
  6. 2024Agent S: An Open Agentic Framework that Uses Computers Like a Human10 Oct
  7. 2024Navigating the Digital World as Humans Do: Universal Visual Grounding for GUI Agents7 Oct
  8. 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environments11 Apr

Other references · 27

  1. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,712
  2. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 14,441
  3. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
  4. 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Modelcited by 7,916
  5. 2015Trust Region Policy Optimizationcited by 2,503
  6. 2019Fine-Tuning Language Models from Human Preferencescited by 2,124
  7. 2024HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Frameworkcited by 1,980
  8. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 1,908
  9. 2025Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training: A Critical Perspectivecited by 1,276
  10. 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Webcited by 1,210
  11. 2015Prioritized Experience Replaycited by 1,070
  12. 2022Large Language Models Can Self-Improvecited by 656
15 more
  1. 2024GPT-4V(ision) is a Generalist Web Agent, if Groundedcited by 547
  2. 2025Open-Reasoner-Zero: An Open Source Approach to Scaling Up Reinforcement Learning on the Base Modelcited by 450
  3. 2023Iterative Preference Learning from Human Feedback: Bridging Theory and Practice for RLHF under KL-Constraintcited by 346
  4. 2018Reinforcement Learning on Web Interfaces Using Workflow-Guided Explorationcited by 282
  5. 2024Aguvis: Unified Pure Vision Agents for Autonomous GUI Interactioncited by 271
  6. 2025Learning to Reason under Off-Policy Guidancecited by 266
  7. 2020On the Global Convergence Rates of Softmax Policy Gradient Methodscited by 258
  8. 2025R-Zero: Self-Evolving Reasoning LLM from Zero Datacited by 210
  9. 2025An Illusion of Progress? Assessing the Current State of Web Agentscited by 165
  10. 2016Stochastic Variance Reduction for Nonconvex Optimizationcited by 143
  11. 2025Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Interactive LLM Agentscited by 103
  12. 2024Agent-E: From Autonomous Web Navigation to Foundational Design Principles in Agentic Systemscited by 79
  13. 2025BREAD: Branched Rollouts from Expert Anchors Bridge SFT & RL for Reasoningcited by 57
  14. 2025CoAct-1: Computer-using Multi-Agent System with Coding Actionscited by 33
  15. 2025UGround: Towards Unified Visual Grounding with Unrolled Transformerscited by 14

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Reinforcement Learning for Computer-Use Agents with Autonomous Evaluation
  2. 2026Kintsugi: Learning Policies by Repairing Executable Knowledge Bases
  3. 2026LiteGUI: Distilling Compact GUI Agents with Reinforcement Learning
  4. 2025Efficient Multi-turn RL for GUI Agents via Decoupled Training and Adaptive Data Curation
  5. 2025GUI-R1 : A Generalist R1-Style Vision-Language Action Model For GUI Agents
  6. 2025GUI-Shift: Enhancing VLM-Based GUI Agents through Self-supervised Reinforcement Learning
  7. 2025VEM: Environment-Free Exploration for Training GUI Agent with Value Environment Model
  8. 2026GUI-GENESIS: Automated Synthesis of Efficient Environments with Verifiable Rewards for GUI Agent Post-Training