Learning Reliable GUI Agents under Imperfect Priors
Organizations: Xi’an Jiaotong University · MiLM Plus, Xiaomi Inc.
Abstract
GUI agents built on large language and vision-language models still struggle on unseen applications and complex multi-step tasks, as completing real GUI tasks depends on app-specific, temporally volatile operational knowledge that is scarce in pretraining corpora. Retrieval-augmented execution offers a natural remedy but faces two coupled bottlenecks: knowledge at scale is hard to acquire, and self-collected priors inevitably drift from the live environment due to version updates, promotions, ads, A/B tests, and personalization. We therefore argue that GUI agents should not pursue perfect knowledge but learn to act correctly under imperfect priors, and propose our framework that couples knowledge acquisition with noise-robust utilization: a structured exploration strategy traverses interactive elements, builds a UI state-transition graph, and synthesizes (task, trajectory) pairs via a VLM without human annotation; a noise-aware training strategy, grounded in a taxonomy of real GUI drift patterns, injects five types of realistic errors into self-explored trajectories to teach the agent to assess prior reliability before acting. Experiments on physical devices and online emulator benchmarks show that our method discovers more unique screens, covers more benchmark tasks, and more effectively rejects erroneous priors while leveraging correct ones, with accuracy gains that transfer across datasets.
Figures & tables
| Operator | Empirical drift analog | Simulated failure mode | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| identity | clean retrieval | none | Follow | |
| surface rephrasing | control renaming | lexical/stylistic variation | Follow | |
| sub-path deletion | step removal | missing intermediate operation | Partial | |
| suffix branch replacement | entry-point/path shift | correct prefix, stale suffix | Partial | |
| irrelevant-op insertion | ads, permissions, overlays | noisy or unrelated step | Partial | |
| other-goal path substitution | wrong-goal retrieval | coherent but irrelevant prior | Ignore |
| Backbone | Method | Accuracy gain over no-prior (pp) | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Correct | Local | Noise | Omit | Rewrite | Other | Avg. | ||
| Qwen3-VL-2B | SFT | 6.53 | 0.41 | 6.53 | 0.82 | 3.27 | 0.00 | 2.93 |
| Ours | 21.63 15.10 | 4.90 4.49 | 13.06 6.53 | 9.80 8.98 | 11.84 8.57 | 8.98 8.98 | 11.70 8.77 | |
| Qwen3-VL-4B | SFT | 18.37 | 3.67 | 11.02 | 4.49 | 8.57 | 4.49 | 8.44 |
| Ours | 21.63 3.26 | 6.53 2.86 | 13.47 2.45 | 7.35 2.86 | 13.47 4.90 | 4.90 0.41 | 11.23 2.79 | |
| Qwen3-VL-8B | SFT | 13.06 | -3.67 | 3.67 | -1.63 | 4.90 | -1.63 | 2.45 |
| Backbone | Method | Mean success rate gain over no-prior (pp) | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AndroidWorld | AndroidLab | MobileWorld | ||
| Qwen3-VL-4B | SFT | -6.80 | -10.32 | -6.20 |
| Ours | -2.60 4.20 | 0.31 10.63 | 7.70 13.90 | |
| GUI-OWL-1.5-4B | SFT | -7.66 | -1.52 | -2.34 |
| Ours | -1.70 5.96 | 1.26 2.78 | 5.22 7.56 | |
| Model | Train Test | Corr. | Local | Noise | Other | Rewrite | Omit | Avg. | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ours | SFT | Ours | SFT | Ours | SFT | Ours | SFT | Ours | SFT | Ours | SFT | Ours | SFT | ||
| Qwen3-2B | CMGUI CUTG | 13.06 | 6.94 | 6.53 | -3.27 | 7.35 | 4.08 | 2.86 | -4.08 | 4.90 | 2.45 | 4.90 | 0.41 | 6.60 | 1.09 |
| CMGUI ChiM | 15.50 | 3.10 | 12.40 | 0.00 | 15.50 | 3.88 | 1.55 | -4.65 | 13.95 | 3.10 | 13.18 | 5.43 | 12.01 | 1.81 | |
| CUTG CMGUI | 7.19 | 3.77 | 3.77 | 3.42 | 6.85 | 5.48 | -4.79 | -3.42 | 3.42 | 2.40 | 7.53 | 6.16 | 3.99 | 2.97 | |
| CUTG ChiM | 10.85 | 2.33 | 8.53 | 0.00 | 6.98 | 2.33 | -1.55 | -1.55 | 7.75 | 3.88 | 10.85 | 7.75 | 7.23 | 2.46 | |
| ChiM CMGUI | 6.51 | 0.00 | 5.48 | -1.71 | 4.79 | 1.71 | -0.34 | -2.40 | 5.48 | 3.77 | 7.88 | 2.05 | 4.97 | 0.57 | |
| Model | CUTG | CMGUI | ChiM-Nav | Average | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ori. | SFT | Part- CoT | Ours | Ori. | SFT | Part- CoT | Ours | Ori. | SFT | Part- CoT | Ours | Ori. | SFT | Part- CoT | Ours | |
| Qwen3-VL-2B | 3.06 | 2.93 | 6.53 | 11.70 | 1.03 | 3.66 | 2.17 | 4.97 | 4.39 | 1.03 | 8.66 | 9.82 | 2.83 | 2.54 | 5.79 | 8.83 |
| Qwen3-VL-4B | 4.83 | 8.44 | 4.42 | 11.23 | 0.57 | 1.49 | 2.28 | 2.40 | 6.59 | 6.72 | 5.95 | 10.21 | 4.00 | 5.55 | 4.22 | 7.95 |
| Qwen3-VL-8B | 5.31 | 2.45 | 9.59 | 11.84 | 0.57 | 2.05 | 2.40 | 1.77 | 4.00 | 5.82 | 11.11 | 10.59 | 3.29 | 3.44 | 7.70 | 8.07 |
| MAI-UI-2B | 0.48 | 3.81 | 5.03 | 7.08 | 4.62 | 2.57 | 4.28 | 6.96 | 4.78 | 2.33 | 5.56 | 7.50 | 3.29 | 2.90 | 4.96 | 7.18 |
| GELab-Zero-4B | 0.54 | 1.63 | 3.33 | 7.08 | 2.00 | 1.43 | 2.28 | 1.66 | 3.36 | 3.75 | 10.21 | 13.18 | 1.97 | 2.27 | 5.27 | 7.31 |
Appendix figures & tables5 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Source | Direct | Full-CoT | No-CoT | Images |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CUTG | 1,789 / 245 | 10,734 / 1,470 | 10,734 / 1,470 | 707 |
| CMGUI | 1,996 / 292 | 11,976 / 1,752 | 11,976 / 1,752 | 2,257 |
| ChiM-Nav | 555 / 129 | 3,330 / 774 | 3,330 / 774 | 684 |
| Total | 4,340 / 666 | 26,040 / 3,996 | 26,040 / 3,996 | 3,648 |
| App | DroidBot | DroidAgent | LLM-Explorer | Humanoid | Ours | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scr. | Act. | Scr. | Act. | Scr. | Act. | Scr. | Act. | Scr. | Act. | |
| Ctrip | 32 | 12 | 11 | 8 | 60 | 1 | 16 | 4 | 219 | 19 |
| Bilibili | 34 | 9 | 30 | 16 | 56 | 10 | 54 | 15 | 196 | 45 |
| NetEase Cloud Music | 19 | 12 | 2 | 3 | 84 | 1 | 40 | 22 | 188 | 34 |
| Amap | 10 | 2 | 11 | 2 | 103 | 6 | 17 | 2 | 142 | 2 |
| Douban | 44 | 30 | – | – | 45 | 8 | 69 | 38 | 120 | 52 |
| Thought:Action:Tool | Qwen3-VL-2B | Qwen3-VL-4B |
|---|---|---|
| (default) | +11.70 | +11.23 |
| +9.52 | +8.91 | |
| +10.51 | +9.13 | |
| +8.76 | +10.05 |
| Backbone | Follow F1 | Partial F1 | Ignore F1 | Macro-F1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GELab-Zero-4B | 92.09 | 64.08 | 64.97 | 73.71 |
| MAI-UI-2B | 91.40 | 56.57 | 60.24 | 69.41 |
| Qwen3-VL-2B | 91.33 | 54.55 | 65.54 | 70.47 |
| Qwen3-VL-4B | 90.00 | 56.41 | 58.62 | 68.34 |
| Average | 91.21 | 58.82 | 63.57 | 70.48 |