LLMs as Scalable, General-Purpose Simulators For Evolving Digital Agent Training

Abstract

Digital agents require diverse, large-scale UI trajectories to generalize across real-world tasks, yet collecting such data is prohibitively expensive in both human annotation, infra and engineering perspectives. To this end, we introduce $\text{UI-Simulator}$, a scalable paradigm that generates structured UI states and transitions to synthesize training trajectories at scale. Our paradigm integrates a digital world simulator for diverse UI states, a guided rollout process for coherent exploration, and a trajectory wrapper that produces high-quality and diverse trajectories for agent training. We further propose $\text{UI-Simulator-Grow}$, a targeted scaling strategy that enables more rapid and data-efficient scaling by prioritizing high-impact tasks and synthesizes informative trajectory variants. Experiments on WebArena and AndroidWorld show that UI-Simulator rivals or surpasses open-source agents trained on real UIs with significantly better robustness, despite using weaker teacher models. Moreover, UI-Simulator-Grow matches the performance of Llama-3-70B-Instruct using only Llama-3-8B-Instruct as the base model, highlighting the potential of targeted synthesis scaling paradigm to continuously and efficiently enhance the digital agents.

Preprint. Project page: https://ui-simulator.notion.site/llms-as-scalable-digital-world-simulator; Code and data: https://github.com/WadeYin9712/UI-Simulator