Wanxia Cao
Author directory2026
GSAR: Goal-State-Anchor Rewards for Mobile GUI Agents with Self-Evolving Data Synthesis
Long Zhang | Yuhan Chen | Chaoran Zhang | Wanxia Cao | Kun Huang | Pengzhi Gao | Wei Liu | Jian Luan | Chenliang Li | Lixin Zou
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Long Zhang | Yuhan Chen | Chaoran Zhang | Wanxia Cao | Kun Huang | Pengzhi Gao | Wei Liu | Jian Luan | Chenliang Li | Lixin Zou
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) based GUI agents stand to benefit significantly from online reinforcement learning (RL). However, their training is bottlenecked by two fundamental issues: current data synthesis methods for GUI Agents rely on specific environments and struggle to generate diverse data, while existing evaluators either suffer from limited scalability or provide inaccurate and unreliable reward signals. To overcome these challenges, we introduce GSAR (Goal-State-Anchor Reward), a RL reward framework that supports scalable task generation and delivers reliable reward signals for stable and efficient policy optimization. Our approach features self-evolving data synthesis, which produces multiple environments through task execution and generates diverse tasks and goal states. Complementing this, a state-anchor mechanism automatically annotates task-relevant UI elements in successful goal states as reference anchors. During RL training, these reference anchors provide accurate, scalable reward signals that substantially enhance efficiency. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our framework achieves over 90% accuracy on offline trajectory verification and performs closest to rule-based methods. Furthermore, agents trained using our reward framework exhibit strong performance on both AndroidWorld and our constructed benchmark, establishing a scalable approach for GUI agent training.
Attention Basin: Why Contextual Position Matters in Large Language Models
Zihao Yi | Zhenqing Ling | Delong Zeng | Haohao Luo | Zhe Xu | Wei Liu | Jian Luan | Wanxia Cao | Ying Shen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zihao Yi | Zhenqing Ling | Delong Zeng | Haohao Luo | Zhe Xu | Wei Liu | Jian Luan | Wanxia Cao | Ying Shen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) is significantly sensitive to the contextual position of information in the input. To investigate the mechanism behind this positional bias, our extensive experiments reveal a consistent phenomenon we term the attention basin: when presented with a sequence of structured items (e.g., retrieved documents or few-shot examples), models systematically assign higher attention to the items at the beginning and end of the sequence, while neglecting those in the middle. Crucially, our analysis further reveals that allocating higher attention to critical information is key to enhancing model performance. Based on these insights, we introduce Attention-Driven Reranking (AttnRank), a two-stage framework that (i) estimates a model’s intrinsic positional attention preferences using a small calibration set, and (ii) reorders retrieved documents or few-shot examples to align the most salient content with these high-attention positions. AttnRank is a model-agnostic, training-free, and plug-and-play method with minimal computational overhead. Experiments on multi-hop QA and few-shot in-context learning tasks demonstrate that AttnRank achieves substantial improvements across 10 large language models of varying architectures and scales, without modifying model parameters or training procedures.