UI-Copilot: Advancing Long-Horizon GUI Automation via Tool-Integrated Policy Optimization
Organizations: Zhejiang University · Apple · Tencent
Abstract
MLLM-based GUI agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in complex user interface interaction tasks. However, long-horizon scenarios remain challenging, as these agents are burdened with tasks beyond their intrinsic capabilities, suffering from memory degradation, progress confusion, and math hallucination. To address these challenges, we present UI-Copilot, a collaborative framework where the GUI agent focuses on task execution while a lightweight copilot provides on-demand assistance for memory retrieval and numerical computation. We introduce memory decoupling to separate persistent observations from transient execution context, and train the policy agent to selectively invoke the copilot as Retriever or Calculator based on task demands. To enable effective tool invocation learning, we propose Tool-Integrated Policy Optimization (TIPO), which separately optimizes tool selection through single-turn prediction and task execution through on-policy multi-turn rollouts. Experimental results show that UI-Copilot-7B achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging MemGUI-Bench, outperforming strong 7B-scale GUI agents such as GUI-Owl-7B and UI-TARS-1.5-7B. Moreover, UI-Copilot-7B delivers a 17.1% absolute improvement on AndroidWorld over the base Qwen model, highlighting UI-Copilot's strong generalization to real-world GUI tasks.
Figures & tables
| #Cross App | Difficulty Level | ||||||||||||||||
| Models | Type | 1 App | 2 App | 3 App | 4 App | Easy | Med | Hard | Avg | ||||||||
| p@1 | p@3 | p@1 | p@3 | p@1 | p@3 | p@1 | p@3 | p@1 | p@3 | p@1 | p@3 | p@1 | p@3 | p@1 | p@3 | ||
| CogAgent | AO | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Qwen2.5VL-7B* | AT | 14.3 | 17.9 | 1.8 | 1.8 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 10.4 | 12.5 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 3.9 | 4.7 |
| UI-Venus-7B | AT | 21.4 | 28.6 | 1.8 | 1.8 | 0.0 | 2.9 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 14.6 | 20.8 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 5.5 | 7.8 |
| UI-S1-7B* | MC | 17.9 | 21.4 | 3.6 | 3.6 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 12.5 | 14.6 | 2.6 | 2.6 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 5.5 | 6.2 |
| Models | AC-High | GUI Odyssey | AC-Real | Wob | AW | Avg | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TM | GR | SR | TM | GR | SR | PG | TSR | SR | SR | SR | |
| Closed-source Models | |||||||||||
| Claude-CU (SoM) ( Anthropic, 2024 ) | 63.7 | 0.0 | 12.5 | 60.9 | 0.0 | 3.1 | – | – | – | 27.9 | – |
| GPT-4o (SoM) ( Hurst et al., 2024 ) | 66.3 | 0.0 | 20.8 | 34.3 | 0.0 | 3.3 | – | – | 62.0 | 34.5 | – |
| Open-source Models | |||||||||||
| Qwen2VL-2B ( Wang et al., 2024b ) | 42.3 | 18.7 | 13.6 | 24.4 | 12.2 | 12.6 | 2.0 | 1.0 | 20.8 | 0.0 | 7.3 |
Appendix figures & tables18 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Action Type | Description |
|---|---|
| click | Tap a specific coordinate on the screen. |
| long_press | Press and hold at for a specified duration. |
| swipe | Perform a swipe gesture from to . |
| answer | Output a textual answer to the task. |
| type | Enter text into the currently focused input field. |
| system_button | Trigger a system-level button (e.g., Home, Back). |
| Models | ScreenSpot | AC-Low | AC-High | GUI Odyssey | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| V2 | Pro | Avg | TM | GR | SR | TM | GR | SR | TM | GR | SR | |
| Closed-source Models | ||||||||||||
| GPT-4o ( Hurst et al., 2024 ) | 18.3 | 0.8 | 9.6 | 74.3 | 0.0 | 19.4 | 66.3 | 0.0 | 20.8 | 34.3 | 0.0 | 3.3 |
| Claude-CU ( Anthropic, 2024 ) | 83.0 | 17.1 | 50.1 | 74.3 | 0.0 | 19.4 | 63.7 | 0.0 | 12.5 | 60.9 | 0.0 | 3.1 |
| Open-source Models | ||||||||||||
| OS-Atlas-4B ( Wu et al., 2024 ) | 71.9 | 3.7 | 37.8 | 91.9 | 83.8 | 80.6 | 49.0 | 49.5 | 22.8 | 49.6 | 34.6 | 20.3 |
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