# Not All Experience Belongs in the Weights: Component Routing for Self-Improving GUI Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01787 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01787/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in GUI and mobile agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 54 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Oct 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 54)

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- [How Memory Management Impacts LLM Agents: An Empirical Study of Experience-Following Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16067/) (2025)
- [Agent Learning via Early Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08558/) (2025)
- [Mobile-Agent-v3.5: Multi-platform Fundamental GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16855/) (2026)
- [ScaleCUA: Scaling Open-Source Computer Use Agents with Cross-Platform Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15221/) (2025)
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- [Prioritized Information Bottleneck Theoretic Framework with Distributed Online Learning for Edge Video Analytics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00146/) (2024)
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- [MobileGym: A Verifiable and Highly Parallel Simulation Platform for Mobile GUI Agent Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26114/) (2026)
- [OpenApps: Simulating Environment Variations to Measure UI-Agent Reliability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20766/) (2025)
- [WHALE: A Simple Recipe for Joint Harness-Weight Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00196/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Vehicular Platooning with Wireless Federated Learning: A Resource-Aware Control Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00856/) (2025)
- [MAGNET: Towards Adaptive GUI Agents with Memory-Driven Knowledge Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19199/) (2026)
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- [RELIEF: Turning Missing Modalities into Training Acceleration for Federated Learning on Heterogeneous IoT Edge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04243/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-improving GUI agents keep the trajectories they produce and return them to the agent, by fine-tuning or by retrieval into the prompt, and studies that compare the two destinations disagree. We attribute this to the unit of experience: a trajectory bundles items with different properties, so a conclusion about the bundle depends on its mix. To address this, (i) we introduce component routing, which splits the experience into locators, procedures, state facts and lessons and sends each component to the context or to the weights, compared on the same items across three backbone families, two environments and three seeds. One pool has two destinations: locators and lessons win in the weights, procedures and state facts in the context. (ii) We fit a rule in two properties measured before any training, recurrence and state-conditionality; it recovers the destination of a held-out backbone family in 24 of 24 cells, two interventions move a component toward the boundary, and routing by the rule beats every whole-trajectory baseline and, by +3.5 points on average, the better single destination of each backbone. (iii) We identify how training and producer-consumer differences change the value of the two destinations: note readout decreases after the same component is written into the weights, most for the items that recur most, context gains increase with the information gap, and weights gains decrease with the policy gap. Code and data will be released.
