Android Coach: Improve Online Agentic Training Efficiency with Single State Multiple Actions
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → GUI and mobile agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Online reinforcement learning (RL) serves as an effective method for enhancing the capabilities of Android agents. However, guiding agents to learn through online interaction is prohibitively expensive due to the high latency of emulators and the sample inefficiency of existing RL algorithms. We identify a fundamental limitation in current approaches: the Single State Single Action paradigm, which updates the policy with one-to-one state-action pairs from online one-way rollouts without fully exploring each costly emulator state. In this paper, we propose Android Coach, a novel framework that shifts the training paradigm to Single State Multiple Actions, allowing the agent to sample and utilize multiple actions for a single online state. We enable this without additional emulator overhead by learning a critic that estimates action values. To ensure the critic serves as a reliable coach, we integrate a process reward model and introduce a group-wise advantage estimator based on the averaged critic outputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of Android Coach: it achieves 7.5% and 8.3% success rate improvements on AndroidLab and AndroidWorld over UI-TARS-1.5-7B, and attains 1.4x higher training efficiency than Single State Single Action methods PPO and GRPO at matched success rates.
Key facts. Cited by 6 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 42 of its 54 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2026.
Builds on
42 of 54 references.
Closest ancestors · 17
Same direction, newest first
- 2026Don't Act Blindly: Robust GUI Automation via Action-Effect Verification and Self-Correction7 Apr
- 2026ANCHOR: Branch-Point Data Generation for GUI Agents6 Feb
- 2025MAI-UI Technical Report: Real-World Centric Foundation GUI Agents26 Dec
- 2025UI-TARS-2 Technical Report: Advancing GUI Agent with Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning2 Sep
- 2025Mobile-Agent-v3: Fundamental Agents for GUI Automation21 Aug
- 2025UI-AGILE: Advancing GUI Agents with Effective Reinforcement Learning and Precise Inference-Time Grounding29 Jul
- 2025GUI-explorer: Autonomous Exploration and Mining of Transition-aware Knowledge for GUI Agent22 May
- 2025ARPO:End-to-End Policy Optimization for GUI Agents with Experience Replay22 May
- 2025GUI-R1 : A Generalist R1-Style Vision-Language Action Model For GUI Agents14 Apr
- 2025UI-R1: Enhancing Efficient Action Prediction of GUI Agents by Reinforcement Learning27 Mar
- 2025VEM: Environment-Free Exploration for Training GUI Agent with Value Environment Model26 Feb
- 2025UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agents21 Jan
5 more
- 2024OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis27 Dec
- 2024AndroidLab: Training and Systematic Benchmarking of Android Autonomous Agents31 Oct
- 2024DigiRL: Training In-The-Wild Device-Control Agents with Autonomous Reinforcement Learning14 Jun
- 2023AppAgent: Multimodal Agents as Smartphone Users21 Dec
- 2023You Only Look at Screens: Multimodal Chain-of-Action Agents20 Sep
Other references · 25
- 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 14,441
- 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
- 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Modelcited by 7,916
- 2023Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttentioncited by 5,767
- 2024HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Frameworkcited by 1,980
- 2015High-Dimensional Continuous Control Using Generalized Advantage Estimationcited by 1,916
- 2017Decoupled Weight Decay Regularizationcited by 1,722
- 2019Advantage-Weighted Regression: Simple and Scalable Off-Policy Reinforcement Learningcited by 750
- 2024AndroidWorld: A Dynamic Benchmarking Environment for Autonomous Agentscited by 450
- 2025AReaL: A Large-Scale Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning System for Language Reasoningcited by 234
- 2025WebSailor: Navigating Super-human Reasoning for Web Agentcited by 218
- 2024ArCHer: Training Language Model Agents via Hierarchical Multi-Turn RLcited by 212
13 more
- 2024GUIOdyssey: A Comprehensive Dataset for Cross-App GUI Navigation on Mobile Devicescited by 190
- 2025WebAgent-R1: Training Web Agents via End-to-End Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learningcited by 162
- 2019Soft Actor-Critic for Discrete Action Settingscited by 161
- 2025PerturboLLaVA: Reducing Multimodal Hallucinations with Perturbative Visual Trainingcited by 37
- 2025Look Before You Leap: A GUI-Critic-R1 Model for Pre-Operative Error Diagnosis in GUI Automationcited by 27
- 2025GUI-Shepherd: Reliable Process Reward and Verification for Long-Sequence GUI Taskscited by 25
- 2025Difficulty-Aware Agentic Orchestration for Query-Specific Multi-Agent Workflowscited by 23
- 2026Thinking with Blueprints: Assisting Vision-Language Models in Spatial Reasoning via Structured Object Representationcited by 21
- 2026OctoBench: Benchmarking Scaffold-Aware Instruction Following in Repository-Grounded Agentic Codingcited by 15
- 2017Expected Policy Gradientscited by 14
- 2025NaviMaster: Learning a Unified Policy for GUI and Embodied Navigation Taskscited by 10
- 2026Atlas: Orchestrating Heterogeneous Models and Tools for Multi-Domain Complex Reasoningcited by 10
- 2026MatchTIR: Fine-Grained Supervision for Tool-Integrated Reasoning via Bipartite Matchingcited by 9
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.
6 papers.
- 2026Step-level Optimization for Efficient Computer-use Agentscited by 7
- 2026MemDreamer: Decoupling Perception and Reasoning for Long Video Understanding via Hierarchical Graph Memory and Agentic Retrieval Mechanismcited by 6
- 2026SWE-AGILE: A Software Agent Framework for Efficiently Managing Dynamic Reasoning Contextcited by 5
- 2026GUI vs. CLI: Execution Bottlenecks in Screen-Only and Skill-Mediated Computer-Use Agentscited by 3
- 2026Are Android GUI Agents Robust Against Runtime Anomalies? AnTrap: Evaluating Agents in Dynamic Adversarial Environmentscited by 1
- 2026GUI-CC: Benchmarking Contextual Consistency of GUI World Models as Agent Environmentscited by 1
- 2026GUI-CC: Benchmarking Contextual Consistency of GUI World Models as Agent Environments30 Aug 2026
- 2026Are Android GUI Agents Robust Against Runtime Anomalies? AnTrap: Evaluating Agents in Dynamic Adversarial Environments25 Aug 2026
- 2026GUI vs. CLI: Execution Bottlenecks in Screen-Only and Skill-Mediated Computer-Use Agents22 Jun 2026
- 2026MemDreamer: Decoupling Perception and Reasoning for Long Video Understanding via Hierarchical Graph Memory and Agentic Retrieval Mechanism5 Jun 2026
- 2026Step-level Optimization for Efficient Computer-use Agents29 Apr 2026
- 2026SWE-AGILE: A Software Agent Framework for Efficiently Managing Dynamic Reasoning Context13 Apr 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025MobileRL: Online Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Mobile GUI Agents
- 2026Generalization in Online Reinforcement Learning for Mobile Agents
- 2026WM-R1: Training GUI Agents to Reason and leverage World Models with Reinforcement Learning
- 2026UI-Mem: Self-Evolving Experience Memory for Online Reinforcement Learning in Mobile GUI Agents
- 2026OS-Themis: A Scalable Critic Framework for Generalist GUI Rewards
- 2026GSAR: Goal-State-Anchor Rewards for Mobile GUI Agents with Self-Evolving Data Synthesis
- 2025EXPO: Stable Reinforcement Learning with Expressive Policies
- 2026ARLArena: A Unified Framework for Stable Agentic Reinforcement Learning