GUI Process Automation (GPA) is a lightweight but general vision-based Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which enables fast and stable process replay with only a single demo. Addressing the fragility of traditional RPA and the non-deterministic risks of current vision language model-based GUI agents, GPA introduces three core benefits: (1) Robustness via Sequential Monte Carlo-based localization to handle rescaling and detection uncertainty; (2) Deterministic and Reliability safeguarded by readiness calibration; and (3) Privacy through fast, fully local execution. This approach delivers the adaptability, robustness, and security required for enterprise workflows. It can also be used as an MCP/CLI tool by other agents with coding capabilities so that the agent only reasons and orchestrates while GPA handles the GUI execution. We conducted a pilot experiment to compare GPA with Gemini 3 Pro (with CUA tools) and found that GPA achieves higher success rate with 10 times faster execution speed in finishing long-horizon GUI tasks.
Figures & tables
GPA
GUI Agents
Traditional RPA
Setup
Learn from a single demonstration
Prompt engineering
Manual scripting and selector labelling
Runtime AI
Tiny local models only
LLM call per action
No AI
Reliability
Deterministic, reliable replay
Non-deterministic
Fragile under UI drift
Privacy
Fully local
Screenshots sent to external providers
Local
Variables
Auto-extracted at build time
Ad hoc via prompting
Hard-coded
Table 1: Comparison of GPA with VLM-based GUI agents and traditional RPA . GPA combines demonstration-based workflow construction with deterministic local execution.
Figure 1: Two phases of GPA: demonstration phase (a) and execution phase (b) . In the demonstration phase, a user interacts with the local desktop environment while the recorder captures screenshots and actions, parses them into step subgraphs, and applies LLM-based post-processing for cleanup and variable extraction. In the execution phase, GPA receives the latest observation from the local computer, loads the current recorded step, parses the screenshot into a UI graph, and combines the parsed graph, recorded workflow graph, and action in SMC localization. A finite state machine orchestrates all the components, checking readiness of each step, control execution, and handle errors.
Figure 2: Example UI graph with detected elements and edges . The highlighted node is the target, and nearby nodes helps localizing the target.
Figure 3: SMC likelihood visualization . The target to click is the checkbox next to “Edit”. (a) shows the likelihood of directly matching the target checkbox. The pointwise maximum over candidates forms the likelihood surface, showing high ambiguity since matching candidates are all identical. (b) shows the likelihood of matching the neighbor nodes of target, which helps us to differentiate the checkbox. (c) shows the joint likelihood, combining the results of (a) and (b).
Figure 4: Mixture prior over scale s : one mode favors no resizing ( s=1 ), and the other favors proportional rescaling.
Figure 5: Process of SMC . The blue points are particles that gradually converge to the target prediction.
Figure 6: Step-execution FSM and the Decide state detail . The top-level FSM is shared across all steps, while the decision logic adds a small scroll-specific branch when needed.
GPA
Gemini 3 pro
Task level
Avg demo steps
Success (%)
Time (s)
Success (%)
Time (s)
Simple
10.80
100
17.84
93.2
210.66
Hard
27.27
100
40.96
87.64
383.24
Avg
22.13
100
33.74
89.38
329.31
Table 2: Pilot results: GPA vs. Gemini GUI agent. Success rate and runtime aggregated by task difficulty (defined by demonstration length).
Appendix figures & tables1 asset
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 7: Precheck pipeline sequence diagram. While the environment executes the current action (gray bar), the pipeline speculatively processes upcoming steps in a background thread. The runner retrieves cached results via try_get , using them directly if confidence is sufficient.
Long-horizon GUI automation remains challenging due to error accumulation over extended interaction sequences. Process Reward Models (PRMs) provide dense step-level supervision for mitigating error accumulation, yet standard PRMs are poorly suited to GUI verification. Standard PRM judgments often rely on superficial visual alignment rather than functional correctness, reflecting an evaluative knowledge gap caused by missing domain-specific adjudication logic. Standard PRMs also perform passive, single-pass visual assessment, which creates Visual Ambiguity when reliable judgment requires actively locating, parsing, or inspecting task-relevant UI evidence. We introduce GUI-PRA, a Process Reward Agent that transforms GUI process evaluation from passive scoring into active investigation. GUI-PRA couples Experience-Injected Criterion Synthesis, which distills generalized verification principles into state-specific criteria, with Criterion-Guided Autoregressive Perception, which uses these criteria to navigate multi-granularity visual tools and gather grounded evidence. On AndroidWorld and Mobile-MiniWoB++, GUI-PRA achieves improvements of 5.0% and 6.5% over standard PRMs on the Qwen-VL series, with Qwen3-VL attaining 54.74% success rate on AndroidWorld. On the offline OS-Critic Bench, GUI-PRA demonstrates strong competitiveness against fully trained critic models.
Large Language Model (LLM) based agents have demonstrated proficiency in multi-step interactions with graphical user interfaces (GUIs). While most research focuses on improving single-task performance, practical scenarios often involve repetitive GUI tasks for which invoking LLM reasoning repeatedly, i.e., the ReAct paradigm, is inefficient. Prior to LLMs, traditional Robotic Process Automation (RPA) offers runtime efficiency but demands significant manual effort to develop and maintain. To bridge this gap, we propose AutoRPA, a framework that automatically distills the decision logic of ReAct-style agents into robust RPA functions. AutoRPA introduces two core innovations: (1) A translator-builder pipeline, where a translator agent converts hard-coded ReAct actions into soft-coded procedures, and a builder agent synthesizes robust RPA functions via retrieval-augmented generation over multiple trajectories; (2) A hybrid repair strategy during code verification, combining RPA execution with ReAct-based fallback for iterative refinement. Experiments across multiple GUI environments demonstrate that RPA functions generated by AutoRPA successfully solve similar tasks while reducing token usage by 82% to 96%, significantly improving runtime efficiency and reusability.
Minghao Chen, Xinyi Hu, Zhou Yu +1
Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Space Information Sensing and Transmission, School of Computer Science, Hangzhou Dianzi University, China.
Autonomous GUI agents based on vision-language models (VLMs) often assume deterministic environment responses, generating actions without verifying whether previous operations succeeded. In real-world settings with network latency, rendering delays, and system interruptions, this assumption leads to undetected action failures, repetitive ineffective behaviors, and catastrophic error accumulation. Moreover, learning robust recovery strategies is challenging due to the high cost of online interaction and the lack of real-time feedback in offline datasets.We propose VeriGUI (Verification-driven GUI Agent), which explicitly models action outcomes and recovery under noisy environments. VeriGUI introduces a Thinking--Verification--Action--Expectation (TVAE) framework to detect failures and guide corrective reasoning, and a two-stage training pipeline that combines Robust SFT with synthetic failure trajectories and GRPO with asymmetric verification rewards. We further construct a Robustness Benchmark based on AndroidControl to evaluate failure recognition and correction. Experiments show that VeriGUI significantly reduces failure loops and improves recovery success while maintaining competitive standard task performance.
Yuzhe Zhang, Xianwei Xue, Xingyong Wu +8
Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, China · Baidu Inc., Beijing, China