FedMobileAgent: Training Mobile Agents Using Decentralized Self-Sourced Data from Diverse Users

The advancement of mobile agents has opened new opportunities for automating tasks on mobile devices. Training these agents requires large-scale high-quality data, which is costly using human labor. Given the vast number of mobile phone users worldwide, if automated data collection from them is feasible, the resulting data volume and the subsequently trained mobile agents could reach unprecedented levels. Nevertheless, two major challenges arise: (1) extracting high-level and low-level user instructions without involving human and (2) utilizing distributed data from diverse users while preserving privacy. To tackle these challenges, we propose FedMobileAgent, a collaborative framework that trains mobile agents using self-sourced data from diverse users. Specifically, it includes two techniques. First, we propose Auto-Annotation, which enables the automatic collection of high-quality datasets during users' routine phone usage with minimal cost. Second, we introduce adapted aggregation to improve federated training of mobile agents on non-IID user data, by incorporating both episode- and step-level distributions. In distributed settings, FedMobileAgent achieves performance comparable to centralized human-annotated models at less than 0.02\% of the cost, highlighting its potential for real-world applications.