VEM: Environment-Free Exploration for Training GUI Agent with Value Environment Model

We propose an environment-free RL framework that decouples value estimation from policy optimization by leveraging a pretrained Value Environment Model (VEM). VEM predicts state-action values directly from offline data, distilling human-like priors about GUI interaction outcomes without requiring next-state prediction or environmental feedback. The framework operates in two stages: (1) pretraining VEM to estimate long-term action utilities and (2) guiding policy exploration with frozen VEM signals, enabling layout-agnostic GUI automation.

Quick Start 🚀

Step 1: Build Environment

conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate lam-rl

git clone https://github.com/hiyouga/LLaMA-Factory.git 
cd LLaMA-Factory
pip install -e ".[torch,metrics]"

Step 2: Prepare Images and Annotations

• Download raw images from SeeClick Website and place them under images/aitw_images.
• To get the labeled data for training the critic model, fill in the api_key and model_name in configs/gpt_config.yaml.
• Then run python3 data_preprocess/aitw.py to generate the data for training the critic model and policy model.

Step 3: Prepare Checkpoints

Download the checkpoints from:

• Auto-UI-Base (choose the base version)
• BLIP2-OPT-2.7B
• RoBERTa-Base
• Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct

Organize the files as follows:

GUI-Agent-RL/
    data/
      aitw_anns/
      images/
    images/
      aitw_images/
    checkpoints/
      Auto-UI-Base/
      blip2-opt-2.7b/
      roberta-base/
      Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct/

Step 4: Train the Critic Model

We use the LLaMA-Factory to train the critic model. Based on our settings, this requires 8 A100 GPUs and uses LoRA for training.

• To obtain the critic model checkpoint for the AITW general task, run:

  sh scripts/train_critic_general.sh

  The critic checkpoints will be stored in checkpoints/critic_general.
• To obtain the critic model checkpoint for the AITW webshopping task, run:

  sh scripts/train_critic_webshopping.sh

  The critic checkpoints will be stored in checkpoints/critic_webshopping.

You can modify the output path by changing the output_dir in the YAML file. Remember to fill in the adapter_name_or_path and export_dir in configs/critic_merge.yaml when merging LoRA.

Step 5: Train the Policy Model

After obtaining the critic model, we use AutoGUI as the base policy model for training:

python3 train.py --task general
python3 train.py --task webshopping

Checkpoints are saved in checkpoints/policy_general and checkpoints/policy_webshopping by default.

Step 6: Evaluation

• Offline Evaluation Please modify the save_path to point to the exact checkpoints you want to evaluate (which you obtained in Step 5).

  python3 train.py --task general --eval
  python3 train.py --task webshopping --eval

• Online Evaluation
  • Set up the Android environment according to this page, obtain the URL, and fill in the appium_server_url in configs/online_eval.yaml.
  • Run the agent demo using:

    python3 models/demo.py --model_path xxx

    Obtain the Gradio public URL and fill in the agent_url in configs/online_eval_general.yaml or configs/online_eval_webshopping.yaml.
  • Execute:

    python3 eval_online.py --task general
    python3 eval_online.py --task webshopping

Citation

If you find this repository useful, please considering giving ⭐ or citing:

@misc{zheng2025vemenvironmentfreeexplorationtraining,
      title={VEM: Environment-Free Exploration for Training GUI Agent with Value Environment Model}, 
      author={Jiani Zheng and Lu Wang and Fangkai Yang and Chaoyun Zhang and Lingrui Mei and Wenjie Yin and Qingwei Lin and Dongmei Zhang and Saravan Rajmohan and Qi Zhang},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2502.18906},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.LG},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18906}, 
}

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