English

SOLAR-RL: Semi-Online Long-horizon Assignment Reinforcement Learning

Machine Learning 2026-04-27 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

As Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) mature, GUI agents are evolving from static interactions to complex navigation. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for training MLLM agents on dynamic GUI tasks, its effective application faces a dilemma. Standard Offline RL often relies on static step-level data, neglecting global trajectory semantics such as task completion and execution quality. Conversely, Online RL captures the long-term dynamics but suffers from high interaction costs and potential environmental instability. To bridge this gap, we propose SOLAR-RL (Semi-Online Long-horizon Assignment Reinforcement Learning). Instead of relying solely on expensive online interactions, our framework integrates global trajectory insights directly into the offline learning process. Specifically, we reconstruct diverse rollout candidates from static data, detect the first failure point using per-step validity signals, and retroactively assign dense step-level rewards with target-aligned shaping to reflect trajectory-level execution quality, effectively simulating online feedback without interaction costs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SOLAR-RL significantly improves long-horizon task completion rates and robustness compared to strong baselines, offering a sample-efficient solution for autonomous GUI navigation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.22558,
  title  = {SOLAR-RL: Semi-Online Long-horizon Assignment Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Jichao Wang and Liuyang Bian and Yufeng Zhou and Han Xiao and Yue Pan and Guozhi Wang and Hao Wang and Zhaoxiong Wang and Yafei Wen and Xiaoxin Chen and Shuai Ren and Lingfang Zeng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.22558},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

14 pages, 11 figures. Accepted to Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:33:51.116Z