Hong Zhou
Author directory2026
Are Android GUI Agents Robust Against Runtime Anomalies? AnTrap: Evaluating Agents in Dynamic Adversarial Environments
Guo Gan | Yilun Zhao | Cong Chen | Jinbiao Wei | Tingyu Song | Zheyuan Yang | Lin Fu | Hong Zhou
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Guo Gan | Yilun Zhao | Cong Chen | Jinbiao Wei | Tingyu Song | Zheyuan Yang | Lin Fu | Hong Zhou
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
GUI agents often encounter dynamic anomalies when deployed on Android devices, from unexpected pop-ups to action misuse, yet existing benchmarks lack systematic evaluation of agent robustness against runtime anomalies. We introduce AnTrap, a comprehensive benchmark that injects dynamic perturbations into agent execution trajectories. We propose a taxonomy organizing real-world anomalies into four layers (State, Thinking, Action and Round) with ten fine-grained subcategories, and develop a construction pipeline that preserves task solvability while introducing realistic adversarial conditions. Evaluating 16 leading GUI models, we reveal universal vulnerability to dynamic anomalies, with even the strongest models suffering significant performance degradation. Furthermore, we conduct GRPO training in both original and adversarial environments to validate our benchmark, separating environment-learnable anomalies from reasoning-bottlenecked ones. Our findings show that while single-step traps at state and action layers are largely addressable through adversarial reinforcement learning, deep contextual traps, like state deadlock, expose intrinsic limitations that cannot be resolved by training in environments with traps alone.
Android Coach: Improve Online Agentic Training Efficiency with Single State Multiple Actions
Guo Gan | Yuxuan Ding | Cong Chen | Yuwei Ren | Yin Huang | Hong Zhou
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Guo Gan | Yuxuan Ding | Cong Chen | Yuwei Ren | Yin Huang | Hong Zhou
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Online reinforcement learning (RL) serves as an effective method for enhancing the capabilities of Android agents. However, guiding agents to learn through online interaction is prohibitively expensive due to the high latency of emulators and the sample inefficiency of existing RL algorithms. We identify a fundamental limitation in current approaches: the Single State Single Action paradigm, which updates the policy with one-to-one state-action pairs from online one-way rollouts without fully exploring each costly emulator state. In this paper, we propose Android Coach, a novel framework that shifts the training paradigm to Single State Multiple Actions, allowing the agent to sample and utilize multiple actions for a single online state. We enable this without additional emulator overhead by learning a critic that estimates action values. To ensure the critic serves as a reliable coach, we integrate a process reward model and introduce a group-wise advantage estimator based on the averaged critic outputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of Android Coach: it achieves 7.5% and 8.3% success rate improvements on AndroidLab and AndroidWorld over UI-TARS-1.5-7B, and attains 1.4x higher training efficiency than Single State Single Action methods PPO and GRPO at matched success rates.