mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Scaling GUI Agents with Visual State Transitions

arXiv 2607.24112 ↗First posted 27 Jul 2026cs.AIcited by 3

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

  1. 2026SeerGuard: A Safety Framework for Mobile GUI Agents via World Model Prediction17 Jul
  2. 2026Xiaomi-GUI-0 Technical Report30 Jun
  3. 2026MobileForge: Annotation-Free Adaptation for Mobile GUI Agents with Hierarchical Feedback-Guided Policy Optimization18 Jun
  4. 2026MobileGym: A Verifiable and Highly Parallel Simulation Platform for Mobile GUI Agent Research25 May
  5. 2026Video2GUI: Synthesizing Large-Scale Interaction Trajectories for Generalized GUI Agent Pretraining14 May
  6. 2026How Mobile World Model Guides GUI Agents?11 May
  7. 2026ClawGUI: A Unified Framework for Training, Evaluating, and Deploying GUI Agents13 Apr
  8. 2026UI-Voyager: A Self-Evolving GUI Agent Learning via Failed Experience25 Mar
  9. 2026Generalization in Online Reinforcement Learning for Mobile Agents8 Mar
  10. 2026UI-Oceanus: Scaling GUI Agents with Synthetic Environmental Dynamics11 Feb
  11. 2026Code2World: A GUI World Model via Renderable Code Generation10 Feb
  12. 2026UI-Venus-1.5 Technical Report9 Feb
25 more
  1. 2026Generative Visual Code Mobile World Models2 Feb
  2. 2026MobileDreamer: Generative Sketch World Model for GUI Agent7 Jan
  3. 2025MAI-UI Technical Report: Real-World Centric Foundation GUI Agents26 Dec
  4. 2025AndroidLens: Long-latency Evaluation with Nested Sub-targets for Android GUI Agents24 Dec
  5. 2025WebSTAR: Scalable Data Synthesis for Computer Use Agents with Step-Level Filtering22 Nov
  6. 2025Grounding Computer Use Agents on Human Demonstrations10 Nov
  7. 2025VideoAgentTrek: Computer Use Pretraining from Unlabeled Videos22 Oct
  8. 2025UltraCUA: A Foundation Model for Computer Use Agents with Hybrid Action20 Oct
  9. 2025ScaleCUA: Scaling Open-Source Computer Use Agents with Cross-Platform Data18 Sep
  10. 2025UI-TARS-2 Technical Report: Advancing GUI Agent with Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning2 Sep
  11. 2025Mobile-Agent-v3: Fundamental Agents for GUI Automation21 Aug
  12. 2025ComputerRL: Scaling End-to-End Online Reinforcement Learning for Computer Use Agents19 Aug
  13. 2025UI-Venus Technical Report: Building High-performance UI Agents with RFT14 Aug
  14. 2025MobileGUI-RL: Advancing Mobile GUI Agent through Reinforcement Learning in Online Environment8 Jul
  15. 2025AgentCPM-GUI: Building Mobile-Use Agents with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning2 Jun
  16. 2025ARPO:End-to-End Policy Optimization for GUI Agents with Experience Replay22 May
  17. 2025GUI-Shift: Enhancing VLM-Based GUI Agents through Self-supervised Reinforcement Learning18 May
  18. 2025GUI-R1 : A Generalist R1-Style Vision-Language Action Model For GUI Agents14 Apr
  19. 2025ScreenSpot-Pro: GUI Grounding for Professional High-Resolution Computer Use4 Apr
  20. 2025UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agents21 Jan
  21. 2024OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis27 Dec
  22. 2024OS-ATLAS: A Foundation Action Model for Generalist GUI Agents30 Oct
  23. 2024On the Effects of Data Scale on UI Control Agents6 Jun
  24. 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environments11 Apr
  25. 2024SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agents17 Jan

Other references · 37

  1. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,418
  2. 2024GPT-4o System Cardcited by 4,467
  3. 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,534
  4. 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Webcited by 1,210
  5. 2025Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretrainingcited by 855
  6. 2025Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scalingcited by 787
  7. 2024Show-o: One Single Transformer to Unify Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 734
  8. 2024Transfusion: Predict the Next Token and Diffuse Images with One Multi-Modal Modelcited by 468
  9. 2024AndroidWorld: A Dynamic Benchmarking Environment for Autonomous Agentscited by 450
  10. 2026Kimi K2.5: Visual Agentic Intelligencecited by 449
  11. 2024Aguvis: Unified Pure Vision Agents for Autonomous GUI Interactioncited by 271
  12. 2024GUIOdyssey: A Comprehensive Dataset for Cross-App GUI Navigation on Mobile Devicescited by 190
25 more
  1. 2024JanusFlow: Harmonizing Autoregression and Rectified Flow for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 162
  2. 2024Aria-UI: Visual Grounding for GUI Instructionscited by 136
  3. 2024Web Agents with World Models: Learning and Leveraging Environment Dynamics in Web Navigationcited by 116
  4. 2024VisualWebBench: How Far Have Multimodal LLMs Evolved in Web Page Understanding and Grounding?cited by 98
  5. 2025CWM: An Open-Weights LLM for Research on Code Generation with World Modelscited by 87
  6. 2025Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation Models: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunitiescited by 81
  7. 2025Agent Learning via Early Experiencecited by 79
  8. 2025Harmonizing Visual Representations for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 74
  9. 2022ScreenQA: Large-Scale Question-Answer Pairs over Mobile App Screenshotscited by 65
  10. 2025OpenUni: A Simple Baseline for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 45
  11. 2025ViMo: A Generative Visual GUI World Model for App Agentscited by 33
  12. 2025UI-S1: Advancing GUI Automation via Semi-online Reinforcement Learningcited by 32
  13. 2025Why Do LLM Agents Fail in Exploring New Environments? A World-Modeling Perspectivecited by 28
  14. 2024Falcon-UI: Understanding GUI Before Following User Instructionscited by 22
  15. 2026Generation Enhances Understanding in Unified Multimodal Models via Multi-Representation Generationcited by 19
  16. 2026Visual Generation Unlocks Human-Like Reasoning through Multimodal World Modelscited by 18
  17. 2025NeuralOS: Towards Simulating Operating Systems via Neural Generative Modelscited by 17
  18. 2026Computer-Using World Modelcited by 16
  19. 2025Fostering Video Reasoning via Next-Event Predictioncited by 15
  20. 2026Disentangled Robot Learning via Separate Forward and Inverse Dynamics Pretrainingcited by 12
  21. 2026World-Model-Augmented Web Agents with Action Correctioncited by 8
  22. 2024Tell Me What's Next: Textual Foresight for Generic UI Representationscited by 5
  23. 2026PatchWorld: Gradient-Free Optimization of Executable World Models for Agent Environmentscited by 5
  24. 2026CGL: Advancing Continual GUI Learning via Reinforcement Fine-Tuningcited by 3
  25. 2026Weblica: Scalable and Reproducible Training Environments for Visual Web Agentscited by 3

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Benchmarking and Improving GUI Agents in High-Dynamic Environments
  2. 2025ScaleTrack: Scaling and back-tracking Automated GUI Agents
  3. 2026EvoGUI: An Evolution-Aware Benchmark for GUI State-Transition Understanding
  4. 2025GTA1: GUI Test-time Scaling Agent
  5. 2026ANCHOR: Branch-Point Data Generation for GUI Agents
  6. 2025GUI Exploration Lab: Enhancing Screen Navigation in Agents via Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning
  7. 2025Enhancing Visual Grounding for GUI Agents via Self-Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning
  8. 2026GUI-CC: Benchmarking Contextual Consistency of GUI World Models as Agent Environments