cs.AIJul 27, 2026

Scaling GUI Agents with Visual State Transitions

Authors: Xiangyan LiuKaixin LiHaonan WangBiao WuMeng FangLongxu DouChao DuMichael Qizhe Shieh+1 more

Organizations: NUS · UTS · University of Liverpool · Sea AI Lab

Abstract

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.

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