cs.AIAug 23, 2026

CausalCache: Conditional High-Fidelity Restoration for Long-Horizon GUI Agents

Authors: Jiaxuan Luo, Zhanfeng Liao, Jiayao Teng, Yuan Wang

Organizations: Johns Hopkins University · Tsinghua University

Abstract

Long-horizon GUI agents can retain complete action histories as compact text, but only a few historical screenshots fit in active context. We formulate this as budgeted fidelity restoration: every event remains summarized, while a fixed budget BB determines which events regain their archived screenshots. Recent-BB assigns all visual slots to the latest events. CausalCache instead scores the complete history and swaps in an older event only when its predicted utility exceeds that of a recent event. A history-gated key/value adapter modifies only restored history-image tokens and is exactly bypassed when no history image is active, preserving current-screen processing. The adapter and selector are trained with matched-budget interventions on desktop trajectories and evaluated zero-shot on mobile. On OSWorld-Verified, activating historical screenshots improves success by about 1313 percentage points over summary-only memory. Under the official 1515-step limit, CausalCache and Recent-44 are statistically indistinguishable; in a 3030-step diagnostic, CausalCache achieves 46.7%46.7\% success versus 42.4%42.4\% (+4.3+4.3 points). Zero-shot on 117117 MobileWorld tasks, CausalCache improves over Recent-44 from 30.2%30.2\% to 36.8%36.8\%. The gain is concentrated on a pre-defined cross-app memory-candidate split (30.6%30.6\% vs. 19.4%19.4\%, +11.2+11.2 points), while single-app controls show no detectable difference (43.6%43.6\% vs. 42.4%42.4\%). These results show that selecting which past events regain pixels is more effective than spending a fixed visual budget entirely on recency.

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