Abstract
End-to-end GUI agents for real desktop environments require large amounts of high-quality interaction data, yet collecting human demonstrations is expensive and existing synthetic pipelines often suffer from limited task diversity or noisy, goal-drifting trajectories. We present a trajectory expansion framework Anchor that bootstraps scalable desktop supervision from a small set of verified seed demonstrations. Starting from each seed, we identify branch points that correspond to meaningful state changes and propose new, state-grounded task variants conditioned on the current GUI context. An executing agent then follows the proposed instructions to generate new trajectories, while a verifier enforces task completion via state-aware checks and trajectory-level consistency. To improve supervision quality, we further apply task-conditioned step-level filtering to remove ungrounded actions and denoise post-branch segments to maintain coherent intent. Experiments on standard desktop benchmarks, OSWorld and WindowsAgentArena, show that models fine-tuned on our expanded corpus achieve consistent improvements over zero-shot agents and representative synthesis baselines, and generalize across applications and operating systems.
- Anthology ID:
- 2026.acl-long.774
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- San Diego, California, United States
- Editors:
- Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 17031–17047
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.774/
- DOI:
- Bibkey:
- Cite (ACL):
- Jinbiao Wei, Yilun Zhao, Kangqi Ni, and Arman Cohan. 2026. Anchor: Branch-Point Data Generation for GUI Agents. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 17031–17047, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Anchor: Branch-Point Data Generation for GUI Agents (Wei et al., ACL 2026)
- Copy Citation:
- PDF:
- https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.774.pdf
- Checklist:
- 2026.acl-long.774.checklist.pdf




















