Learn How to Act from Your Own Interactions: On-Policy Self-Distillation for GUI Agents

Abstract:Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents enable the fulfillment of complex user instructions through multi-turn interactions with software environments, requiring step-wise reasoning and long-horizon memory to guide actions and retain task-relevant information, respectively. Recent on-policy self-distillation (OPSD) methods have achieved strong performance on GUI grounding, a foundational subtask for GUI agents, owing to dense token-level supervision from privilege-conditioned self-teachers. However, extending existing OPSD methods to multi-turn GUI agents is hindered by self-teachers' limited privilege-following ability and insufficient privileged guidance. In this paper, we introduce GUI-SD-v2, the next version of GUI-SD, which extends OPSD from GUI grounding to multi-turn GUI interaction and addresses key limitations through a two-stage training framework. Specifically, GUI-SD-v2 first strengthens privilege following by jointly optimizing rollouts with and without privileged guidance from the same GUI states. Furthermore, it selectively distills step-specific reasoning and memory guidance through a privilege-conditioned self-teacher, supporting action decisions and the retention of task-relevant information for subsequent interactions. Extensive experiments on two representative GUI agent benchmarks, AndroidWorld and MobileWorld, show that GUI-SD-v2 compares favorably with existing OPSD baselines while consistently outperforming the evaluated state-of-the-art methods in both Pass@1 and Pass@3 success rates. Code and training data will be publicly released.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.27307 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.27307v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.27307 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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