# GUI-Libra: Training Native GUI Agents to Reason and Act with Action-aware Supervision and Partially Verifiable RL

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22190 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22190/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 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 52 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 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, 30 of 52)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14476/) (2025)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training: A Critical Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20783/) (2025)
- [Group Sequence Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18071/) (2025)
- [CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08914/) (2023)
- [UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12326/) (2025)
- [SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10935/) (2024)
- [Group-in-Group Policy Optimization for LLM Agent Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10978/) (2025)
- [GLM-4.5V and GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01006/) (2025)
- [OS-ATLAS: A Foundation Action Model for Generalist GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23218/) (2024)
- [WebRL: Training LLM Web Agents via Self-Evolving Online Curriculum Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02337/) (2024)
- [GUI-R1 : A Generalist R1-Style Vision-Language Action Model For GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10458/) (2025)
- [ShowUI: One Vision-Language-Action Model for GUI Visual Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17465/) (2024)
- [UI-TARS-2 Technical Report: Advancing GUI Agent with Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02544/) (2025)
- [DigiRL: Training In-The-Wild Device-Control Agents with Autonomous Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11896/) (2024)
- [Agent Q: Advanced Reasoning and Learning for Autonomous AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07199/) (2024)
- [GUIOdyssey: A Comprehensive Dataset for Cross-App GUI Navigation on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08451/) (2024)
- [Rewards-in-Context: Multi-objective Alignment of Foundation Models with Dynamic Preference Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10207/) (2024)
- [UI-R1: Enhancing Efficient Action Prediction of GUI Agents by Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21620/) (2025)
- [OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19723/) (2024)
- [The Surprising Effectiveness of Negative Reinforcement in LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01347/) (2025)
- [Fine-Tuning Large Vision-Language Models as Decision-Making Agents via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10292/) (2024)
- [Aria-UI: Visual Grounding for GUI Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16256/) (2024)
- [Scaling Computer-Use Grounding via User Interface Decomposition and Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13227/) (2025)
- [AgentTrek: Agent Trajectory Synthesis via Guiding Replay with Web Tutorials](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09605/) (2024)
- [OpenVLThinker: Complex Vision-Language Reasoning via Iterative SFT-RL Cycles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17352/) (2025)
- [What Can RL Bring to VLA Generalization? An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19789/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Code as Agent Harness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18747/) (2026)
- [WebXSkill: Skill Learning for Autonomous Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13318/) (2026)
- [OpenMobile: Building Open Mobile Agents with Task and Trajectory Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15093/) (2026)
- [How Mobile World Model Guides GUI Agents?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10347/) (2026)
- [Learning Agentic Policy from Action Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12004/) (2026)
- [CAPTCHA Solving for Native GUI Agents: Automated Reasoning-Action Data Generation and Self-Corrective Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23559/) (2026)
- [Mem-W: Latent Memory-Native GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09317/) (2026)
- [AppDeltaWorld: Transition-Grounded Delta Code World Model for Mobile GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05891/) (2026)
- [Learning Generalizable Behaviors for Terminal Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22631/) (2026)
- [PAGER: Bridging the Semantic-Execution Gap in Point-Precise Geometric GUI Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15963/) (2026)
- [Software Engineering for and with GUI Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09278/) (2026)
- [SportsGrounder: Proposal-Aided Interleaved Grounding for Dense Sports Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07932/) (2026)
- [BrowserForge: Scaling Web Episode via Parallel Browser Sandboxes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24848/) (2026)
- [WM-R1: Training GUI Agents to Reason and leverage World Models with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27508/) (2026)
- [Decoupling What from Where: How Should a Small GUI Grounding Model Receive the Action Type?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07444/) (2026)
- [ConClick: Element-Wise Contrastive Learning Improves GUI Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13268/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Open-source native GUI agents still lag behind closed-source systems on long-horizon navigation tasks. This gap stems from two limitations: a shortage of high-quality, action-aligned reasoning data, and the direct adoption of generic post-training pipelines that overlook the unique challenges of GUI agents. We identify two fundamental issues in these pipelines: (i) standard SFT with CoT reasoning often hurts grounding, and (ii) step-wise RLVR-tyle training faces partial verifiability, where multiple actions can be correct but only a single demonstrated action is used for verification. This makes offline step-wise metrics weak predictors of online task success. In this work, we present GUI-Libra, a tailored training recipe that addresses these challenges. First, to mitigate the scarcity of action-aligned reasoning data, we introduce a data construction and filtering pipeline and release a curated 81K GUI reasoning dataset. Second, to reconcile reasoning with grounding, we propose action-aware SFT that mixes reasoning-then-action and direct-action data and reweights tokens to emphasize action and grounding. Third, to stabilize RL under partial verifiability, we identify the overlooked importance of KL regularization in RLVR and show that a KL trust region is critical for improving offline-to-online predictability; we further introduce success-adaptive scaling to downweight unreliable negative gradients. Across diverse web and mobile benchmarks, GUI-Libra consistently improves both step-wise accuracy and end-to-end task completion. Our results suggest that carefully designed post-training and data curation can unlock significantly stronger task-solving capabilities without costly online data collection. We release our dataset, code, and models to facilitate further research on data-efficient post-training for reasoning-capable GUI agents.