UI-Oceanus: Scaling GUI Agents with Synthetic Environmental Dynamics

Abstract: Scaling generalist GUI agents is hindered by the data scalability bottleneck of expensive human demonstrations and the "distillation ceiling" of synthetic teacher supervision. To transcend these limitations, we propose UI-Oceanus, a framework that shifts the learning focus from mimicking high-level trajectories to mastering interaction physics via ground-truth environmental feedback. Through a systematic investigation of self-supervised objectives, we identify that forward dynamics, defined as the generative prediction of future interface states, acts as the primary driver for scalability and significantly outweighs inverse inference. UI-Oceanus leverages this insight by converting low-cost autonomous exploration, which is verified directly by system execution, into high-density generative supervision to construct a robust internal world model. Experimental evaluations across a series of models demonstrate the decisive superiority of our approach: models utilizing Continual Pre-Training (CPT) on synthetic dynamics outperform non-CPT baselines with an average success rate improvement of 7% on offline benchmarks, which amplifies to a 16.8% gain in real-world online navigation. Furthermore, we observe that navigation performance scales with synthetic data volume. These results confirm that grounding agents in forward predictive modeling offers a superior pathway to scalable GUI automation with robust cross-domain adaptability and compositional generalization.