Title: GUI-R1: A Generalist R1-Style Vision-Language Action Model For GUI Agents
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: GUI Grounding, Reinforcement learning

Abstract: Existing efforts in building graphical user interface (GUI) agents largely rely on the training paradigm of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on large vision-language models (LVLMs). However, this approach not only demands extensive amounts of training data but also struggles to effectively understand GUI screenshots and generalize to unseen interfaces. The issue significantly limits its application in real-world scenarios, especially for high-level tasks. Inspired by reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) in large reasoning models (e.g., DeepSeek-R1), which efficiently enhances the problem-solving capabilities of large language models in real-world settings, we propose GUI-R1, the first reinforcement learning framework designed to enhance the GUI capabilities of LVLMs in high-level real-world task scenarios, through unified action space rule modeling. By leveraging a small amount of carefully curated high-quality data across multiple platforms (including Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android, and Web) and improved policy optimization algorithms to update the model, GUI-R1 achieves superior performance using only 0.02\% of the data (3K vs. 13M) compared to previous state-of-the-art methods like OS-Atlas across eight benchmarks spanning three different platforms (mobile, desktop, and web). These results demonstrate the immense potential of reinforcement learning based on unified action space rule modeling in improving the execution capabilities of LVLMs for real-world GUI agent tasks. We will fully open-source GUI-R1 to benefit the research field.