Code2World: A GUI World Model via Renderable Code Generation
Authors: Yuhao Zheng, Li', An Zhong, Yi Wang, Rui Dai, Kaikui Liu, Xiangxiang Chu, Linyuan Lü, Philip Torr, Kevin Qinghong Lin
Abstract
GUI agents interact with environments by perceiving interfaces and executing actions. As a virtual sandbox, the GUI World model empowers agents with human-like foresight by enabling action-conditioned prediction. However, existing text/pixel-based approaches struggle to achieve both high visual fidelity and fine-grained structural controllability. To this end, we propose \textbf{Code2World}, a vision-language coder that simulates the next visual state via \textbf{renderable code generation}. Specifically, to address the data scarcity problem, we construct \textbf{AndroidCode} by translating GUI trajectories into high-fidelity HTML and refining synthesized code through a visual-feedback revision mechanism, yielding a corpus of \textbf{over 80K} high-quality screen-action pairs. To adapt existing VLMs into code prediction, we first perform SFT as a cold start for format layout following, then further apply \textbf{Render-Aware Reinforcement Learning} which uses rendered outcome as the reward signal by enforcing visual semantic fidelity and action consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Code2World-8B achieves the top-performing next UI prediction, rivaling the competitive GPT-5 and Gemini-3-Pro-Image. Notably, \textit{Code2World significantly enhances downstream navigation success rates in a flexible manner}, boosting Gemini-2.5-Flash by {+9.5\%} on AndroidWorld navigation.