LightAgent: Lightweight and Cost-Efficient Mobile Agents

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission18787 Authors

Keywords: GUI Agent, LLM, Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: With the advancement of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), building GUI agent systems has become an increasingly promising direction—especially for mobile platforms, given their rich app ecosystems and intuitive touch interactions. Yet mobile GUI agents face a critical dilemma: truly on-device models (4B or smaller) lack sufficient performance, while capable models (starting from 7B) are either too large for mobile deployment or prohibitively costly (e.g., cloud-only closed-source MLLMs). To resolve this, we propose LightAgent, a mobile GUI agent system that leverages device-cloud collaboration to tap the cost-efficiency of on-device models and the high capability of cloud models, while avoiding their drawbacks. Specifically, LightAgent enhances Qwen2.5-VL-3B via two-stage SFT→GRPO training on synthetic GUI data for strong decision-making, integrates an efficient long-reasoning mechanism to utilize historical interactions under tight resources, and defaults to on-device execution—only escalating challenging subtasks to the cloud via real-time complexity assessment. Experiments on the online AndroidLab benchmark and diverse apps show LightAgent matches or nears larger models, with a significant reduction in cloud costs.

Primary Area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities

Submission Number: 18787