GSAR: Goal-State-Anchor Rewards for Mobile GUI Agents with Self-Evolving Data Synthesis
Organizations: Wuhan University · Xiaomi Inc.
Abstract
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) based GUI agents stand to benefit significantly from online reinforcement learning (RL). However, their training is bottlenecked by two fundamental issues: current data synthesis methods for GUI Agents rely on specific environments and struggle to generate diverse data, while existing evaluators either suffer from limited scalability or provide inaccurate and unreliable reward signals. To overcome these challenges, we introduce GSAR (Goal-State-Anchor Reward), a RL reward framework that supports scalable task generation and delivers reliable reward signals for stable and efficient policy optimization. Our approach features self-evolving data synthesis, which produces multiple environments through task execution and generates diverse tasks and goal states. Complementing this, a state-anchor mechanism automatically annotates task-relevant UI elements in successful goal states as reference anchors. During RL training, these reference anchors provide accurate, scalable reward signals that substantially enhance efficiency. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our framework achieves over 90% accuracy on offline trajectory verification and performs closest to rule-based methods. Furthermore, agents trained using our reward framework exhibit strong performance on both AndroidWorld and our constructed benchmark, establishing a scalable approach for GUI agent training.
Figures & tables
| Model | Data Sources | AndroidControl-Low | AndroidControl-High | GUI-Odyssey | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TM | EM | TM | EM | TM | EM | ||
| OS-Genesis-7B | Model | 90.7 | 74.2 | 65.9 | 44.4 | 11.7 | 3.6 |
| OS-Atlas-7B | Human&Model | 73.0 | 67.3 | 70.4 | 56.5 | 91.8* | 76.8* |
| Aguvis-7B | Human&Model | 93.9 | 89.4 | 65.6 | 54.2 | 26.7 | 13.5 |
| Qwen2.5-VL-7B | – | 94.1 | 85.0 | 75.1 | 62.9 | 59.5 | 46.3 |
| Ours (aw-app) | Model | 95.4 | 90.2 | 76.1 | 66.1 | 65.8 | 48.4 |
| Method | Qwen3-VL-8B | Qwen3-VL-32B | GPT-4o | Gemini-2.5-pro | Avg | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Acc | F1 | Acc | F1 | Acc | F1 | Acc | F1 | Acc | F1 | |
| DigiRL | 67.0 | 64.9 | 71.4 | 65.9 | 63.8 | 56.2 | 71.1 | 64.3 | 68.3 | 62.8 |
| DistRL | 67.9 | 69.3 | 80.0 | 79.7 | 69.8 | 66.9 | 82.5 | 82.3 | 75.0 | 74.5 |
| StepCritic | 64.4 | 74.1 | 76.8 | 81.0 | 81.3 | 84.0 | 87.9 | 88.3 | 77.6 | 81.8 |
| GS-Only | 84.1 | 84.2 | 83.8 | 83.9 | 78.1 | 78.8 | 86.0 | 85.9 | 83.0 | 83.2 |
| GSA-Only | 87.6 | 88.2 | 86.4 | 86.9 | 81.3 | 80.9 | 89.8 | 90.1 | 86.3 | 86.5 |
| Method | Qwen3-VL-8B | Qwen3-VL-32B | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Acc | F1 | Acc | F1 | |
| w/o reference | 64.4 | 74.1 | 76.8 | 81.0 |
| w/o anchor | 87.3 | 88.0 | 90.5 | 90.7 |
| w/o history | 87.6 | 88.2 | 86.4 | 86.9 |
| GSAR (Ours) | 90.2 | 91.0 | 92.1 | 92.4 |
| Type | Answer | Delete | Normal | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Count | 20 | 15 | 47 | 82 |
| Accuracy | 90.0 | 100.0 | 89.4 | 91.5 |
| Reward Method | Average Rollout Time (s) |
|---|---|
| Rule-based | 2754.92 |
| GSAR (Model-based) | 2342.02 |
Appendix figures & tables10 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Hyperparameters | All methods |
|---|---|
| Fine-tuning method | LoRA |
| LoRA rank ( ) | 8 |
| LoRA | 16 |
| Train batch size | 128 |
| Training epochs | 3 |
| Learning rate |
| Hyperparameters | All methods |
|---|---|
| Train batch size | 32 |
| PPO batch size | 256 |
| Training steps | 80 |
| Max turn | 20 |
| Rollout numbers | 8 |
| Temperature | 0.7 |
| Model | Data Sources | AndroidControl-Low | AndroidControl-High | GUI-Odyssey | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TM | EM | TM | EM | TM | EM | ||
| UI-TARS-7B-SFT | – | 95.05 | 91.52 | 79.10 | 71.21 | 80.71 | 66.98 |
| GSAR (aw-app) | Model | 94.99 | 91.53 | 80.33 | 71.97 | 81.78 | 68.01 |
| GSAR (extra-app) | Model | 95.01 | 91.48 | 80.76 | 72.41 | 81.90 | 67.93 |
| UI-TARS-7B-DPO | – | 92.05 | 88.74 | 80.77 | 73.56 | 85.29 | 68.33 |
| GSAR (aw-app) | Model | 92.82 | 89.52 | 81.04 | 73.85 | 85.56 | 71.28 |
| Stage | Edge Density | Entropy | UI Elements |
|---|---|---|---|
| Early (Iter 1–2) | 0.0240 | 1.90 | 22.68 |
| Later (Iter 5–6) | 0.0295 | 2.11 | 24.56 |
| Task Type | Task string length | Trajectory length |
|---|---|---|
| Normal | 144.41 | 7.91 |
| Complexified | 338.92 | 12.08 |
| Dataset | =1 | =2 | =3 | =4 | =5 | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aw-app | 44 | 281 | 214 | 126 | 328 | 45.7% |
| extra-app | 110 | 342 | 196 | 83 | 229 | 32.5% |
| Method | Delete | Answer | Normal | Overall | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Acc | F1 | Acc | F1 | Acc | F1 | Acc | F1 | |
| DigiRL | 81.4 | 80.0 | 41.4 | 0.0 | 79.0 | 75.5 | 71.1 | 64.3 |
| DistRL | 86.4 | 86.2 | 75.7 | 80.0 | 83.9 | 82.1 | 82.5 | 82.3 |
| StepCritic | 96.6 | 96.7 | 77.1 | 77.8 | 89.3 | 89.7 | 87.9 | 88.3 |
| GS-Only | 91.5 | 92.1 | 77.1 | 79.0 | 87.6 | 86.7 | 86.0 | 85.9 |
| GSA-Only | 88.1 | 88.5 | 85.7 | 88.1 | 91.9 | 91.5 | 89.8 | 90.1 |
RL for GUI Agents
Reinforcement learning for GUI agents trains screen-based AI to complete multi-step tasks across mobile, web, and desktop interfaces.
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