Where to Learn and How Far to Roll Out: Efficient Adaptive Training for GUI Agents

Yuxiang Chai, Quyu Kong, Panrong Tong and Steven Hoi (Alibaba Group), with Yue Wang (CUHK MMLab), introduce a two-stage training framework for GUI agents that decides where to learn and how far to roll out, cutting environment interaction by 56-61% relative to vanilla GRPO.
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Where to learn. Stage I builds checkpoints from successful expert trajectories, picks pivots by action disagreement across sampled GUI actions, and runs one-step RL on those uncertain decisions.
How far to roll out. Stage II expands policy responsibility through adaptive Local, Suffix and Root training according to task progress.
Checkpoint cost. Restoring a checkpoint takes 2.97 seconds on MobileGym against 15.7 seconds to replay a 10-step prefix, and 3.21 seconds against 11.3 seconds on CUA-Gym-Hub.
Result. Across MobileGym and CUA-Gym-Hub, environment interaction falls by 56-61% while task performance improves.
Abstract
Trajectory-level GRPO is a common approach for training multi-step GUI agents, but repeatedly rolling out complete trajectories from the task root can be inefficient: task-level rewards provide coarse supervision over which intermediate decisions require improvement, while already-mastered prefixes are repeatedly re-executed before reaching difficult states. We introduce a two-stage adaptive training framework that jointly addresses where to learn and how far to roll out. We first construct reusable intermediate checkpoints from successful expert trajectories and select informative pivots using action disagreement, which measures uncertainty directly from sampled GUI actions. Stage I performs one-step RL at these pivots to improve uncertain local decisions. Stage II then progressively expands policy responsibility through adaptive Local, Suffix, and Root training according to task progress. Recoverable checkpoints enable repeated training from intermediate states without replaying the preceding trajectory. Across MobileGym and CUA-Gym-Hub, our method reduces environment interaction by 56-61% relative to Vanilla GRPO while improving task performance, demonstrating that jointly allocating training across states and rollout ranges can substantially improve GUI-agent RL efficiency.