Seg2Click: Learning Pixel-Level Action Masks for GUI Visual Grounding

GUI grounding, the task of locating the interface element specified by a user instruction, is a fundamental capability of GUI agents. However, existing grounding models remain error-prone, often causing downstream task failures. We systematically evaluate 10 grounding models across five datasets and identify a major error pattern: most incorrect clicks hit non-target interface elements rather than the background, with different models repeatedly selecting the same distractors. Motivated by these findings, we propose ConClick, a contrastive learning framework that teaches models to distinguish the target element from plausible distractors. We construct ConClick-Data, a dataset containing 4,292 challenging target-distractor pairs, and train the model using complementary listwise ranking and pairwise margin objectives. ConClick improves the grounding accuracy of Qwen3-VL-8B from 54.71% to 66.03% on ScreenSpot-Pro, from 83.72% to 86.28% on MMBench-GUI L2, and from 63.33% to 70.20% on OSWorld-G, outperforming prior methods built on the same or similarly sized backbones. We further introduce ReClick, an inference-time strategy that revisits promising regions and compares predictions across competing candidates, yielding an additional 2.96 percentage-point improvement in average accuracy across the three benchmarks. Together, our analysis, dataset, and methods provide both empirical insights and practical tools for building more reliable GUI agents. Data and code are available at https://github.com/zhangruotian/ConClick.

GUI grounding maps natural-language instructions to click locations and is essential for reliable GUI agents. The task remains difficult on high-resolution, densely populated interfaces because a vision-language model (VLM) may recognize a requested control without locating it precisely enough for interaction. Most existing methods provide various forms of localization assistance, but still rely on a direct click prediction, allowing visual ambiguity or an inaccurate initial estimate to propagate to the final result. In this paper, we introduce GUI-Lens, a coarse-to-fine grounding framework that allows a general-purpose VLM to determine the target through active visual observations. Specifically, GUI-Lens extracts OCR text and detected UI components from the screenshot and presents their positions as coordinate references. Using the instruction, the current view, and these references, the VLM selects the region and scale of the next view, which is cropped and enlarged to provide finer visual details. This process continues over successively focused views until the target is determined. Proposed crops and clicks are checked against the instruction throughout the process, and the final local position is mapped back to the original screen coordinates. Experiments on four GUI grounding benchmarks and three general-purpose VLM backends show that GUI-Lens improves overall grounding accuracy by up to 24.9 percentage points and achieves state-of-the-art performance with GPT-5.5.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) element grounding (precisely locating elements on screenshots based on natural language instructions) is fundamental for agents interacting with GUIs. Deploying this capability directly on resource-constrained devices like mobile phones is increasingly critical for GUI agents requiring low latency. However, this goal faces a significant challenge, as current visual grounding methods typically employ large vision-language model (VLM) (more than 2.5B parameters), making them impractical for on-device execution due to memory and computational constraints. To address this, this paper introduces GoClick, a lightweight GUI element grounding VLM with only 230M parameters that achieves excellent visual grounding accuracy, even on par with significantly larger models. Simply downsizing existing decoder-only VLMs is a straightforward way to design a lightweight model, but our experiments reveal that this approach yields suboptimal results. Instead, we select an encoder-decoder architecture, which outperforms decoder-only alternatives at small parameter scales for GUI grounding tasks. Additionally, the limited capacity of small VLMs encourages us to develop a Progressive Data Refinement pipeline that utilizes task type filtering and data ratio adjustment to extract a high-quality 3.8M-sample core set from a 10.8M raw dataset. Training GoClick using this core set brings notable grounding accuracy gains. Our experiments show that GoClick excels on multiple GUI element grounding benchmarks while maintaining a small size and high inference speed. GoClick also enhances GUI agent performance when integrated into a device-cloud collaboration framework, where GoClick helps cloud-based task planners perform precise element localization and achieve higher success rates. We hope our method serves as a meaningful exploration within the GUI agent community.