Scaling GUI Agents with Visual State Transitions
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → GUI and mobile agents
Abstract (arXiv)
We introduce State Transition Pretraining (STP) as a new scaling axis for GUI agents. During the STP stage, we continually pretrain a unified multimodal model on visual state transitions by jointly optimizing inverse dynamics (predicting actions from state changes) and forward dynamics (predicting next states from current states and actions). This optimization equips the model with better action-grounded visual representations and an internal world model of GUI dynamics. When subsequently fine-tuned on trajectories with task instructions, our STP-trained models consistently outperform baselines trained solely via direct trajectory fine-tuning across agent benchmarks in both desktop and mobile GUI scenarios (AgentNetBench, AndroidControl, and GUIOdyssey). Further empirical studies show that joint dynamics optimization yields stable improvements over single-objective training, and downstream performance scales steadily with the volume of transition data.
Key facts. Cited by 3 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 74 of its 80 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 Jul 2026.
Builds on
74 of 80 references.
Closest ancestors · 37
Same direction, newest first
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- 2026MobileForge: Annotation-Free Adaptation for Mobile GUI Agents with Hierarchical Feedback-Guided Policy Optimization18 Jun
- 2026MobileGym: A Verifiable and Highly Parallel Simulation Platform for Mobile GUI Agent Research25 May
- 2026Video2GUI: Synthesizing Large-Scale Interaction Trajectories for Generalized GUI Agent Pretraining14 May
- 2026How Mobile World Model Guides GUI Agents?11 May
- 2026ClawGUI: A Unified Framework for Training, Evaluating, and Deploying GUI Agents13 Apr
- 2026UI-Voyager: A Self-Evolving GUI Agent Learning via Failed Experience25 Mar
- 2026Generalization in Online Reinforcement Learning for Mobile Agents8 Mar
- 2026UI-Oceanus: Scaling GUI Agents with Synthetic Environmental Dynamics11 Feb
- 2026Code2World: A GUI World Model via Renderable Code Generation10 Feb
- 2026UI-Venus-1.5 Technical Report9 Feb
25 more
- 2026Generative Visual Code Mobile World Models2 Feb
- 2026MobileDreamer: Generative Sketch World Model for GUI Agent7 Jan
- 2025MAI-UI Technical Report: Real-World Centric Foundation GUI Agents26 Dec
- 2025AndroidLens: Long-latency Evaluation with Nested Sub-targets for Android GUI Agents24 Dec
- 2025WebSTAR: Scalable Data Synthesis for Computer Use Agents with Step-Level Filtering22 Nov
- 2025Grounding Computer Use Agents on Human Demonstrations10 Nov
- 2025VideoAgentTrek: Computer Use Pretraining from Unlabeled Videos22 Oct
- 2025UltraCUA: A Foundation Model for Computer Use Agents with Hybrid Action20 Oct
- 2025ScaleCUA: Scaling Open-Source Computer Use Agents with Cross-Platform Data18 Sep
- 2025UI-TARS-2 Technical Report: Advancing GUI Agent with Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning2 Sep
- 2025Mobile-Agent-v3: Fundamental Agents for GUI Automation21 Aug
- 2025ComputerRL: Scaling End-to-End Online Reinforcement Learning for Computer Use Agents19 Aug
- 2025UI-Venus Technical Report: Building High-performance UI Agents with RFT14 Aug
- 2025MobileGUI-RL: Advancing Mobile GUI Agent through Reinforcement Learning in Online Environment8 Jul
- 2025AgentCPM-GUI: Building Mobile-Use Agents with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning2 Jun
- 2025ARPO:End-to-End Policy Optimization for GUI Agents with Experience Replay22 May
- 2025GUI-Shift: Enhancing VLM-Based GUI Agents through Self-supervised Reinforcement Learning18 May
- 2025GUI-R1 : A Generalist R1-Style Vision-Language Action Model For GUI Agents14 Apr
- 2025ScreenSpot-Pro: GUI Grounding for Professional High-Resolution Computer Use4 Apr
- 2025UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agents21 Jan
- 2024OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis27 Dec
- 2024OS-ATLAS: A Foundation Action Model for Generalist GUI Agents30 Oct
- 2024On the Effects of Data Scale on UI Control Agents6 Jun
- 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environments11 Apr
- 2024SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agents17 Jan
Other references · 37
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- 2024AndroidWorld: A Dynamic Benchmarking Environment for Autonomous Agentscited by 450
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- 2024Aguvis: Unified Pure Vision Agents for Autonomous GUI Interactioncited by 271
- 2024GUIOdyssey: A Comprehensive Dataset for Cross-App GUI Navigation on Mobile Devicescited by 190
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- 2024VisualWebBench: How Far Have Multimodal LLMs Evolved in Web Page Understanding and Grounding?cited by 98
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- 2025OpenUni: A Simple Baseline for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 45
- 2025ViMo: A Generative Visual GUI World Model for App Agentscited by 33
- 2025UI-S1: Advancing GUI Automation via Semi-online Reinforcement Learningcited by 32
- 2025Why Do LLM Agents Fail in Exploring New Environments? A World-Modeling Perspectivecited by 28
- 2024Falcon-UI: Understanding GUI Before Following User Instructionscited by 22
- 2026Generation Enhances Understanding in Unified Multimodal Models via Multi-Representation Generationcited by 19
- 2026Visual Generation Unlocks Human-Like Reasoning through Multimodal World Modelscited by 18
- 2025NeuralOS: Towards Simulating Operating Systems via Neural Generative Modelscited by 17
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- 2026Disentangled Robot Learning via Separate Forward and Inverse Dynamics Pretrainingcited by 12
- 2026World-Model-Augmented Web Agents with Action Correctioncited by 8
- 2024Tell Me What's Next: Textual Foresight for Generic UI Representationscited by 5
- 2026PatchWorld: Gradient-Free Optimization of Executable World Models for Agent Environmentscited by 5
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- 2026Weblica: Scalable and Reproducible Training Environments for Visual Web Agentscited by 3
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.
3 papers.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
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- 2025GUI Exploration Lab: Enhancing Screen Navigation in Agents via Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning
- 2025Enhancing Visual Grounding for GUI Agents via Self-Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning
- 2026GUI-CC: Benchmarking Contextual Consistency of GUI World Models as Agent Environments