# ANCHOR: Branch-Point Data Generation for GUI Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07153 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07153/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 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 17 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [GUI and mobile agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/gui-and-mobile-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13854/) (2023)
- [Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06070/) (2023)
- [OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07972/) (2024)
- [GPT-4V(ision) is a Generalist Web Agent, if Grounded](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01614/) (2024)
- [Android in the Wild: A Large-Scale Dataset for Android Device Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10088/) (2023)
- [Windows Agent Arena: Evaluating Multi-Modal OS Agents at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08264/) (2024)
- [OS-Copilot: Towards Generalist Computer Agents with Self-Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07456/) (2024)
- [On the Effects of Data Scale on UI Control Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03679/) (2024)
- [Agent S: An Open Agentic Framework that Uses Computers Like a Human](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08164/) (2024)
- [WebLINX: Real-World Website Navigation with Multi-Turn Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05930/) (2024)
- [OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19723/) (2024)
- [AutoWebGLM: A Large Language Model-based Web Navigating Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03648/) (2024)
- [AgentTrek: Agent Trajectory Synthesis via Guiding Replay with Web Tutorials](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09605/) (2024)
- [Explorer: Scaling Exploration-driven Web Trajectory Synthesis for Multimodal Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11357/) (2025)
- [OSWorld-Human: Benchmarking the Efficiency of Computer-Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16042/) (2025)
- [Scaling Synthetic Task Generation for Agents via Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25047/) (2025)
- [GUI-ReWalk: Massive Data Generation for GUI Agent via Stochastic Exploration and Intent-Aware Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15738/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Step-level Optimization for Efficient Computer-use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27151/) (2026)
- [Android Coach: Improve Online Agentic Training Efficiency with Single State Multiple Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07277/) (2026)
- [GUI vs. CLI: Execution Bottlenecks in Screen-Only and Skill-Mediated Computer-Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24551/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

End-to-end GUI agents for real desktop environments require large amounts of high-quality interaction data, yet collecting human demonstrations is expensive and existing synthetic pipelines often suffer from limited task diversity or noisy, goal-drifting trajectories. We present a trajectory expansion framework Anchor that bootstraps scalable desktop supervision from a small set of verified seed demonstrations. Starting from each seed, we identify branch points that correspond to meaningful state changes and propose new, state-grounded task variants conditioned on the current GUI context. An executing agent then follows the proposed instructions to generate new trajectories, while a verifier enforces task completion via state-aware checks and trajectory-level consistency. To improve supervision quality, we further apply task-conditioned step-level filtering to remove ungrounded actions and denoise post-branch segments to maintain coherent intent. Experiments on standard desktop benchmarks, OSWorld and WindowsAgentArena, show that models fine-tuned on our expanded corpus achieve consistent improvements over zero-shot agents and representative synthesis baselines, and generalize across applications and operating systems.