cs.AIMay 18, 2026

DocOS: Towards Proactive Document-Guided Actions in GUI Agents

Authors: Jingjing LiuZiye HuangZihao ChengZeming LiuJiahong WuYuhang GuoKehai ChenYunhong Wang+1 more

Abstract

While Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents have shown promising performance in automated device interaction, they primarily depend on static parametric knowledge from pre-training or instruction tuning. This reliance fundamentally limits their ability to handle long-tailed tasks that require explicit procedural knowledge absent from model parameters, often forcing agents to resort to inefficient and brittle trial-and-error exploration. To mitigate this limitation, we introduce \textbf{Proactive Document-Guided Action} for GUI agents in dynamic, open-web environments, a novel paradigm that mirrors human problem-solving by enabling agents to autonomously search for relevant documentation to resolve long-tailed tasks. To evaluate agents' capability in this paradigm, we propose \textbf{DocOS}, a benchmark designed to assess document-guided problem solving in fully interactive environments. DocOS requires agents to autonomously navigate a web browser, locate relevant online documentation, comprehend procedural instructions, and faithfully ground them into executable GUI actions. Extensive experiments reveal that progress is strictly constrained by dual bottlenecks: agents struggle to reliably locate relevant information during proactive search and frequently fail to faithfully ground retrieved instructions into precise actions, pointing toward document-guided interaction as a crucial pathway for enabling self-evolving GUI agents in dynamic environments.

Explore similar work

Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

Qwen-UI-Agent Technical Report: Toward Next-Generation Real-World Centric Foundation GUI Agents

GUI agents have the potential to become a general purpose executor over existing digital devices. To advance them toward real-world use, we envision agents that operate reliably on real devices, execute workflows across platforms, combine GUI interaction with CLI execution, complete long-horizon tasks, proactively initiate useful services, and autonomously improve their capabilities with minimal human effort. Guided by this vision, we present Qwen-UI-Agent, a real-world centric foundation GUI agent spanning mobile, computer-use, web, and DeepSearch environments. Qwen-UI-Agent combines diverse sandbox environments with a large-scale real-device mobile runtime. Its unified action space interleaves GUI operations with CLI execution and generates batched actions in a single model turn. An AutoResearch-style data flywheel uses agents to construct tasks and environments, diagnose failures, and plan subsequent iterations. Online RL supports training on trajectories exceeding 100 turns, with over 10,000 concurrent environments accelerating rollout. A lightweight harness layer supports proactive service initiation and stateful workflows across mobile and computer. Across a broad suite of evaluations, Qwen-UI-Agent sets state-of-the-art performance on mobile-use benchmarks while delivering competitive performance on computer- and browser-use tasks against frontier models, including Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT-5.6 Sol. On mobile use, it achieves 82.1% on MobileWorld, 92.2% on MobileWorld-Real, and 97.5% on AndroidDaily. On computer use, it achieves 79.5% on OSWorld-Verified and a 40.0% partial-progress score on OSWorld-v2. On browser use and GUI grounding, it achieves 73.6% on WebArena and 81.5% on ScreenSpot-Pro, respectively.
Hanzhang Zhou, Panrong Tong, Xu Zhang +13
Jul 17, 2026cs.AI

Beyond Sequential Interaction: Benchmarking Parallel Execution and Coordination for GUI Agents

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents are systems powered by large multimodal models (LMMs). They perceive screen state and execute user instructions through GUI actions such as clicking, typing, and scrolling on desktops and mobile devices. However, current agents scale poorly to long-horizon tasks: actions incur costly LMM inferences, and performance degrades as context grows. Humans divide such workloads among collaborators who complete sub-tasks in parallel. Yet parallel coordination among GUI agents has received little attention. To close this gap, we introduce ParaGUIBench, to our knowledge, the first benchmark dedicated to parallel execution and coordination of multiple GUI agents on separate desktop instances. It consists of three components: a multi-device Docker infrastructure with a shared file system; a dataset of 233 tasks spanning six task categories; and an evaluation system with efficiency metrics, including step reduction ratio and token cost. We further introduce ParaGUI, a planner-worker agent that decomposes GUI tasks and dispatches sub-tasks to concurrent workers on separate desktop instances. On ParaGUIBench, ParaGUI reaches a 46.4% success rate, outperforming the strongest serial baseline (Claude Sonnet 4.6) by 12.9 points while using roughly half the steps and less than half the tokens. These results show that parallel execution can improve both success rate and efficiency on decomposable, long-horizon GUI tasks, pointing to a direction worth further study.
Zedong Yu, Qianxing Li, Zhi Gao +8
May 12, 2026cs.AI

Executable Agentic Memory for GUI Agent

Modern GUI agents typically rely on a model-centric and step-wise interaction paradigm, where LLMs must re-interpret the UI and re-decide actions at every screen, which is fragile in long-horizon tasks. In this paper, we propose Executable Agentic Memory (EAM), a structured Knowledge Graph (KG) that shifts GUI planning from free-form generation to a robust retrieval-and-execution process. Our approach includes a sample-efficient memory construction pipeline using state-aware DFS and action-group mining to compress multi-step routines. To ensure efficient planning, we introduce a value-guided graph search where a lightweight Q-function model steers Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) over the KG. We theoretically establish bias-consistency for the Q-model and derive sample complexity bounds for path recovery. Empirically, EAM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines like UI-TARS-7B by up to 19.6%19.6\% on AndroidWorld, while reducing token costs 6×6\times relative to GPT-4o. With a 2.82.8s average latency, EAM enables reliable, quick, and long-horizon GUI automation.
Zerui Qin, Sheng Yue, Xingyuan Hua +2