# UI-Oceanus: Scaling GUI Agents with Synthetic Environmental Dynamics

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.02345 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02345/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 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 40 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [GUI and mobile agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/gui-and-mobile-agents/)
- Knowledge distillation / [On-policy and self-distillation for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/distill/on-policy-and-self-distillation-for-llms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01603/) (2019)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10122/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised Learning from Images with a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08243/) (2023)
- [Does Reinforcement Learning Really Incentivize Reasoning Capacity in LLMs Beyond the Base Model?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13837/) (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)
- [Behavioral Cloning from Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01954/) (2018)
- [OS-ATLAS: A Foundation Action Model for Generalist GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23218/) (2024)
- [Android in the Wild: A Large-Scale Dataset for Android Device Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10088/) (2023)
- [Aguvis: Unified Pure Vision Agents for Autonomous GUI Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04454/) (2024)
- [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)
- [On the Effects of Data Scale on UI Control Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03679/) (2024)
- [GUIOdyssey: A Comprehensive Dataset for Cross-App GUI Navigation on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08451/) (2024)
- [Mobile-Agent-v3: Fundamental Agents for GUI Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15144/) (2025)
- [OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19723/) (2024)
- [Android in the Zoo: Chain-of-Action-Thought for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02713/) (2024)
- [GUICourse: From General Vision Language Models to Versatile GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11317/) (2024)
- [GUI Agents with Foundation Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04890/) (2024)
- [Widget Captioning: Generating Natural Language Description for Mobile User Interface Elements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04295/) (2020)
- [Agent Learning via Early Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08558/) (2025)
- [Explorer: Scaling Exploration-driven Web Trajectory Synthesis for Multimodal Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11357/) (2025)
- [On the Interplay of Pre-Training, Mid-Training, and RL on Reasoning Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07783/) (2025)
- [VAGEN: Reinforcing World Model Reasoning for Multi-Turn VLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16907/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [MobileForge: Annotation-Free Adaptation for Mobile GUI Agents with Hierarchical Feedback-Guided Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19930/) (2026)
- [Scaling GUI Agents with Visual State Transitions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24112/) (2026)
- [Securing Computer-Use Agents: A Unified Architecture-Lifecycle Framework for Deployment-Grounded Reliability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07110/) (2026)
- [Does Learning to Predict the World Help Agents Act? Auditing World-Model Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33335/) (2026)
- [Terrarium: Growing Personal Assistants via Scalable Synthesis of App Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14860/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scaling generalist GUI agents is hindered by the data scalability bottleneck of expensive human demonstrations and the "distillation ceiling" of synthetic teacher supervision. To transcend these limitations, we propose UI-Oceanus, a framework that shifts the learning focus from mimicking high-level trajectories to mastering interaction physics via ground-truth environmental feedback. Through a systematic investigation of self-supervised objectives, we identify that forward dynamics, defined as the generative prediction of future interface states, acts as the primary driver for scalability and significantly outweighs inverse inference. UI-Oceanus leverages this insight by converting low-cost autonomous exploration, which is verified directly by system execution, into high-density generative supervision to construct a robust internal world model. Experimental evaluations across a series of models demonstrate the decisive superiority of our approach: models utilizing Continual Pre-Training (CPT) on synthetic dynamics outperform non-CPT baselines with an average success rate improvement of 7% on offline benchmarks, which amplifies to a 16.8% gain in real-world online navigation. Furthermore, we observe that navigation performance scales with synthetic data volume. These results confirm that grounding agents in forward predictive modeling offers a superior pathway to scalable GUI automation with robust cross-domain adaptability and compositional generalization.