@inproceedings{wang-etal-2026-towards-scalable,
    title = "Towards Scalable Lightweight {GUI} Agents via Multi-role Orchestration",
    author = "Wang, Ziwei  and
      Zheng, Junjie  and
      Yang, Leyang  and
      Zhou, Sheng  and
      Tang, Xiaoxuan  and
      Zhouhua, Fang  and
      Liu, Zhiwei  and
      Chen, Dajun  and
      Li, Yong  and
      Bu, Jiajun",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1122/",
    pages = "22359--22388",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Autonomous Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) enable digital automation on end-user devices. While scaling both parameters and data has yielded substantial gains, advanced methods still suffer from prohibitive deployment costs on resource-constrained devices. When facing complex in-the-wild scenarios, lightweight GUI agents are bottlenecked by limited capacity and poor task scalability under end-to-end episodic learning, impeding multi-agent systems (MAS) adaptation, while training multiple skill-specific experts remains costly. Can we strike an effective trade-off in this cost{--}scalability dilemma, enabling lightweight MLLMs to participate in realistic GUI workflows? To address these challenges, we propose LAMO framework, which endows a lightweight MLLM with GUI-specific knowledge and task scalability, allowing multi-role orchestration to expand their capability boundary for GUI automation. LAMO combines role-oriented data synthesis with a two-stage training recipe: (i) supervised fine-tuning with Perplexity-Weighted Cross-Entropy optimization for knowledge distillation and visual perception enhancement, and (ii) reinforcement learning for role-oriented cooperative exploration. Via LAMO, we develop a task-scalable native GUI agent LAMO-3B supporting monolithic execution and MAS-style orchestration. When paired with advanced planners, as a plug-and-play policy executor, LAMO-3B can continuously benefit from planner advances, enabling a higher performance ceiling. Extensive static and online evaluations validate the effectiveness of our designs."
}