Graphical User Interface Agents

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Period ending 2026-09-21

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151 papers

Latest in Graphical User Interface Agents

Jun 22, 2026cs.AI

GUI vs. CLI: Execution Bottlenecks in Screen-Only and Skill-Mediated Computer-Use Agents

Computer-use agents can execute software tasks through either graphical interfaces or programmatic command interfaces, but existing evaluations confound interaction modality with differences in tasks, initial states, verifiers, and permitted actions. We introduce a matched execution-layer benchmark of 440 desktop tasks across 18 applications and 12 workflow categories, where screen-only GUI agents and skill-mediated CLI agents receive identical goals, states, and final-state verifiers while being restricted to modality-native actions. In this controlled setting, the strongest GUI agent reaches a 59.1% full pass rate, outperforming the strongest original-skill CLI agent at 48.2%; however, verifier-guided skill augmentation raises CLI success to 69.3%, showing that much of the CLI deficit comes from incomplete skill coverage rather than model capability alone. These results suggest that GUI and CLI expose different execution bottlenecks: GUI agents are limited by reliable grounded interaction over long-horizon workflows, whereas CLI agents are limited by the coverage and scalability of their skill interfaces.
Xiao Zhou, Siyue Zhang, Yilun Zhao +4
Jun 22, 2026cs.AI

ENVS: Environment-Native Verified Search for Long-Horizon GUI Agents

As multimodal agents move from interface understanding to real software control, successful trajectory discovery in live desktop environments becomes a key challenge. GUI tasks require long-horizon sequences of precise mouse and keyboard actions, while feedback is sparse, delayed, and costly to obtain through VM rollouts. We propose Environment-Native Verified Search (ENVS), a training-time search-and-filter pipeline that uses the environment to construct verified supervision before policy optimization: it branches over behaviorally distinct GUI actions in live OSWorld VMs, verifies successful leaves, and trains from globally balanced step-level supervision. To evaluate robustness under realistic desktop interruptions, we also introduce OSWorld-Noisy, a dynamic benchmark for recoverable desktop interruptions that preserves the original tasks while testing whether agents can refocus, dismiss, wait, or recover under live perturbations. On the 300-task OSWorld pool, ENVS reaches 30.3 pass@8 on original evaluations and 29.0 on OSWorld-Noisy, outperforming matched ARPO-style online RL while reducing compute from 184-192 to 138-153 GPU-hours; even with only 30% of its search data, ENVS reaches 27.0 pass@8, exceeding ARPO from the base model. Training from noisy environments also better preserves visual-reasoning abilities on auxiliary benchmarks, including OSWorld-G Refusal (16.7 vs. 1.9) and BLINK Functional Correspondence (26.2 vs. 23.1).
Yincheng Zhou, Athena Zhuoming Zhong, Shijie Zhang +3
Jun 17, 2026cs.AI

Skill-Guided Continuation Distillation for GUI Agents

Improving GUI agents typically relies on behavior cloning on expert trajectories. However, as the current policy deviates from the expert policy, it inevitably encounters policy-induced off-trajectory states during closed-loop execution, i.e., states that fall outside the expert trajectories. Since expert trajectories provide no demonstrations for these unseen states, such states receive no effective supervision, leaving the policy unable to select the correct action. To close this supervision gap, we propose Skill-Guided Continuation Distillation (SGCD), an iterative self-improvement framework. SGCD first runs the plain policy without skill guidance for a few steps to reach realistic off-trajectory states. From these states, a skill-guided policy then completes the task and produces successful continuations, which are mixed with expert trajectories to supply supervision over policy-induced off-trajectory states. The skills are extracted from both successful and failed rollouts, consisting of Continuation Plans, Critical Targets, Failure Traps, and Success Criteria. On OSWorld-Verified, SGCD improves the success rate of three base models from the low-30% range to over 50%, demonstrating its effectiveness and generality.
Zhimin Fan, Hongwei Yu, Yeqing Shen +9
Jun 16, 2026cs.AI

Trust the Right Teacher: Quality-Aware Self-Distillation for GUI Grounding

Graphical user interface (GUI) grounding requires vision-language models (VLMs) to identify small target elements in high-resolution screenshots and predict precise screen coordinates. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is a promising post-training approach for this coordinate-sensitive task, since it provides dense token-level teacher signals beyond hard coordinate labels. However, naive OPSD is not well suited to GUI grounding: OPSD evaluates the teacher on student-generated prefixes, the quality of coordinate-token teacher signals can degrade when the prefix has already deviated from the target coordinate, leading to unreliable teacher signal. To mitigate this, We propose quality-aware self-distillation for VLM-based GUI grounding, which improves coordinate-token teacher-signal quality through soft correctness-aware gating and teacher-probability scaling. The soft correctness-aware gate checks whether the teacher's current coordinate-token prediction can still be completed into the ground-truth box under the student-generated prefix. If not, the corresponding teacher signal is down-weighted. Teacher-probability scaling then uses the teacher's confidence as a lightweight factor to further calibrate the strength of the gated supervision. A key empirical finding is that neither component alone improves overall performance, whereas combining them consistently improves performance. This suggests that the two mechanisms play complementary roles: correctness-aware gating suppresses unreliable coordinate-token supervision, while teacher-probability scaling calibrates the strength of the remaining signals. Experiments across six GUI grounding benchmarks show that our method consistently improves the base model and outperforms strong baselines.
Jingyuan Huang, Zuming Huang, Yucheng Shi +4
Jun 16, 2026cs.CV

Video2Code: Generating Interactive Webpages from UI Videos via Action-Aware Revisit

UI videos provide a natural input for generating interactive webpages, as they capture both webpage appearance and action-triggered state transitions. However, directly applying video-capable vision-language models to this task remains insufficient. Existing models typically rely on sparse sampling or compressed temporal representations, which may miss short action boundaries and break the state-action-state transitions needed to implement webpage behavior. We formulate UI video-to-code generation as executable state-transition recovery from interaction videos, and identify this failure mode as state-transition misalignment. We introduce Video2Code, an action-aware video-to-code approach for recovering executable UI state transitions. Rather than allocating the visual budget uniformly across the video, Video2Code first performs coarse video understanding to locate action-critical regions, then invokes a temporal clipping tool to revisit these regions at higher temporal resolution before generating HTML/CSS/JavaScript code. We instantiate Video2Code with action-aligned video-code supervision and evaluate it under both visual and functional criteria. Experiments show that Video2Code substantially strengthens the underlying open-source model for UI video-to-code generation, improving functional correctness over direct video observation, especially on dense multi-step interactions.
Mingde Xu, Zhen Yang, Yan Wang +7
Jun 16, 2026cs.SE

Beyond the GUI Paradigm: Do Mobile Agents Need the Phone Screen?

Recent advances in mobile agents are dominated by the GUI paradigm, in which agents perceive UI information and emit screen interactions. However, mobile platforms also expose a command-line interface (CLI) that provides direct access to device services and data. We argue CLI deserves first-class consideration alongside GUI. We evaluate three coding agents (Claude Code, Terminus-2, mini-swe-agent) across four model APIs on AndroidWorld and MobileWorld without any mobile-specific post-training, comparing against three reproducible GUI baselines (GUI-Owl-1.5-32B, MAI-UI, Qwen3-VL-32B). Claude Code (Opus 4.7) reaches 71.8% and 51.9%, outperforming every reproducible GUI baseline (69.3/68.1/57.8% on AndroidWorld; 43.2/26.3/13.3% on MobileWorld), while every other CLI configuration remains competitive. To establish the paradigm's ceiling, we provide oracle CLI solutions that reach 88.8% on AndroidWorld (103/116 tasks CLI-solvable) and 86.3% on MobileWorld (101/117 tasks CLI-solvable), indicating substantial room for future improvement. To cover everyday user intents beyond the GUI scope, we introduce the \textbf{CLI-Advantage Task Suite}, comprising 45 templates across five categories: bulk operations, multi-condition filtering, aggregation, cross-app workflows, and hidden device state. Every CLI agent outperforms every GUI baseline in all five categories, with substantially fewer steps per task (10.7 vs.\ 18.6). To support future research on mobile CLI agents, we will open-source agent implementations, oracle solutions, the CLI-Advantage suite, and evaluation infrastructure.
Li Gu, Zihuan Jiang, Linqiang Guo +6
Jun 15, 2026cs.AI

LabOSBench: Benchmarking Computer Use Agents for Scientific Instrument Control

Current computer-use benchmarks primarily focus on software operation tasks in virtualized systems, whereas scientific instrumentation scenarios require coordinated control over complex interfaces, and feedback-driven parameter adjustment. However, directly evaluating agents on physical high-precision instruments is impractical due to high cost, safety risks, limited accessibility, and difficulty in ensuring reproducible evaluation. This motivates the need for a simulated yet realistic testbed that preserves the operational challenges of scientific instruments while enabling scalable and safe benchmarking. To this end, we introduce LabOSBench, a challenging benchmark for multimodal GUI agents built on a suite of web-based scientific-instrument simulators. Operating directly via a browser, LabOSBench avoids resource-heavy OS virtualization while supporting flexible task configuration and execution-based evaluation. Specifically, LabOSBench constructs 96 subtasks across eight instrument simulators, covering workflows from sample loading, alignment, parameter tuning, and data acquisition to result inspection. We evaluate general-purpose vision-language models, specialized GUI agent models, and advanced agentic frameworks at both subtask and end-to-end levels. Our experiments reveal that while existing agents can complete many structured GUI subtasks, they still struggle with feedback-driven operations and long-horizon workflow execution. Overall, LabOSBench provides a reproducible, low-cost testbed for advancing computer-using agents toward scientific-instrument control.
Anqi Zou, Han Deng, Chengyu Zhang +9
Jun 12, 2026cs.AI

VISTA: View-Consistent Self-Verified Training for GUI Grounding

When applying Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for GUI Grounding, rollouts are sampled from a single screenshot view; groups often become either all failures on difficult instances or all successes on easy ones, yielding no useful relative advantage. We propose VISTA (View-Consistent Self-Verified Training), a GRPO-based training framework that constructs each comparison group from multiple target-preserving views of the same GUI instance.Each view is generated by a crop that keeps the target element visible and remaps its box exactly, so model rollouts are compared across semantically equivalent but geometrically different inputs. To stabilize short coordinate generation without turning reinforcement learning into unconditional imitation, VISTA further adds a self-verified cross-view anchor: an oracle answer optimized with an advantage-weighted loss, excluded from the group baseline and activated only when the model has produced a maximum-reward rollout. Across five GUI-grounding benchmarks and multiple Qwen backbones, VISTA consistently improves grounding accuracy.On ScreenSpot-Pro, it raises Qwen3-VL 4B/8B/30B-A3B from 55.5/52.7/53.7 to 63.4/65.8/67.0. Robustness analyses further show higher worst-view accuracy and lower prediction flip rates.
Xinyu Qiu, Yunzhu Zhang, Heng Jia +3
Jun 12, 2026cs.CL

PhoneHarness: Harnessing Phone-Use Agents through Mixed GUI, CLI, and Tool Actions

Phone agents are increasingly expected to complete real mobile workflows rather than merely predict the next screen action. However, much of the current mobile-agent literature still evaluates agents primarily as GUI controllers that observe a screen, emit taps and swipes, and are scored by target app state. Real phone-use tasks are broader: they require deciding when to use app GUIs, device-side commands, or structured tools, while leaving evidence that the intended side effect actually occurred. We introduce PhoneHarness, a mixed-action benchmark and execution harness for studying phone-use agents on verifiable mobile workflows. PhoneHarness runs a device-side agent loop over GUI, CLI, and host-side tool actions, combining deterministic action routing with bounded GUI delegation and auditable execution traces. Its benchmark, PhoneHarness Bench, evaluates whether agents complete tasks with observable side effects, not only whether they produce plausible final answers. On the annotated evaluation split, PhoneHarness reaches a 75.0% pass rate, outperforming the strongest non-PhoneHarness settings by 12.9 percentage points. PhoneHarness and PhoneHarness Bench therefore play distinct but mutually dependent roles: the harness makes mixed phone workflows executable, while the benchmark measures whether agents can use that harness reliably and safely. Our findings suggest that reliable phone automation depends on action-surface routing and verifiable execution, not only visual GUI control.
Chenxin Li, Zhengyao Fang, Zhengyang Tang +18
Jun 12, 2026cs.MA

Naive Visual Memory is Not Enough: A Failure-Mode Study of GUI Agents

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents are increasingly used to automate complex computer tasks across applications, websites, and operating systems. To improve their reliability, recent work has introduced experiential memory, where agents retrieve prior trajectories to guide decision-making in similar states. More recent approaches further extend this idea to visual memory by storing and retrieving screenshots from past interactions, providing agents with richer contextual information than text-only memories. However, the effect of visual memory in GUI agents remains insufficiently understood: it is unclear which failures visual memory mitigates, or which failures it exacerbates. To systematically analyze the effect of visual memory, we introduce a taxonomy of four GUI agent failures (i.e., cognitive failure, visual state misunderstanding, hidden operation blindness, and grounding error) that map to distinct stages of the perception-reasoning-action pipeline. We find that prepending full-image memory has a divergent effect on the failure distribution: it reduces state-level failures but worsens action-level ones, and increases hidden operation blindness and grounding error. Motivated by this finding, we propose Action-Grounded Visual Memory (AGMem), an action-grounded memory framework for GUI agents. The core idea of AGMem is to store image crops that capture the local GUI region closely related to a successful action or a recovery, rather than storing full screenshots. Experiments on OSWorld show that AGMem improves task success rates by 33.3 % over full-image memory. These results demonstrate that AGMem is an effective representation for visual memory in GUI agents.
Seoyoung Choi, Minseok Ko, Hyunseok Lee +4
Jun 11, 2026cs.SE

ComAct: Reframing Professional Software Manipulation via COM-as-Action Paradigm

Existing computer-use agents remain fundamentally limited in professional software manipulation: GUI-based agents suffer from fragile visual grounding and long-horizon error accumulation, while API-basedapproaches struggle with heterogeneous protocols and inaccessible commercial interfaces. In this work,we identify the Component Object Model (COM) as a unified executable abstraction, proposing COM-as-Action: a new paradigm that reframes professional software interaction as deterministic program synthesisrather than sequential visual control. To validate this paradigm in the most demanding environments, weintroduce ComCADBench, the first benchmark for agents operating real industrial CAD software. Ourexperiments reveal a substantial paradigm gap: frontier proprietary models achieve near-zero successunder GUI-based interaction, whereas COM-based execution yields substantial immediate gains. Tobridge the remaining gap between syntactic correctness and geometric accuracy, we develop ComActor, aself-correcting agent trained through a progressive three-stage framework, alongside ComForge, a scalableplatform for large-scale training in Windows containers. Extensive experiments show that ComActorachieves state-of-the-art performance on ComCADBench, with strong resilience in long-horizon taskswhere baselines collapse, and generalizes to external CAD benchmark.
Jiaxin Ai, Tao Hu, Xuemeng Yang +11
Jun 11, 2026cs.AI

Reasoning for Mobile User Experience with Multimodal LLMs: Task, Benchmark, and Approach

User experience (UX) centered on usability, perceived consistency, and functional clarity is fundamental to real-world user interfaces (UI). The application of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in the field of user interfaces is evolving rapidly, such as visual element grounding, graphical user interface (GUI) agents, and design-to-code generation. However, research efforts on evaluating UX based on UI screenshots are still immature. To address this, we propose UXBench, a novel multimodal benchmark consisting of 2,000 VQA data samples designed to assess MLLMs' ability to perform UI-based reasoning. UXBench includes 8 tasks based on real-world UI screenshots that require fine-grained diagnosis of UX issues across layout relationships, visual hierarchy, and content consistency. Our extensive evaluation of mainstream MLLMs shows that they remain fundamentally limited in their capacity for UI-based reasoning. The results underscore the need for further advancements in this area. To bridge this gap, we propose UI-UX, an MLLM based on Qwen3-VL-4B-Thinking foundation model and enhanced via reinforcement learning with two key innovations: a reward routing mechanism that dynamically balances perceptual understanding and logical reasoning during inference, and an asymmetric transition reward that suppresses redundant or insufficient reasoning steps. Experiments demonstrate that UI-UX achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on UXBench, attaining an accuracy of 0.7963 -- surpassing Claude-4.5-Sonnet's 0.6550 -- while exhibiting strong generalization across diverse UI tasks and maintaining low inference latency.
Ruichao Mao, Zhou Fang, Teng Guo +9
Jun 11, 2026cs.AI

GUITrans2Act: Understanding User Operational Behaviors from Mobile GUI Interactions with Vision-Language Models

Understanding the digital world on mobile devices is shifting from static UI perception to dynamic action comprehension. This capability enables models to convert visual state transitions into operational knowledge, defined as short natural-language sentences that describe action types, target UI elements, textual arguments, and execution orders. However, due to the highly diverse and heterogeneous UI designs across applications, existing vision-language models (VLMs) struggle to accurately infer these underlying operations. To bridge this gap, we introduce Teach VLM, a core model designed to translate mobile screen trajectories into step-wise operational knowledge by extracting and analyzing operation-related keyframes from demonstration videos. To address the scarcity of aligned training data, we develop a systematic data flywheel for scalable data acquisition. We further introduce a novel Chinese Mobile Screen Teach Benchmark for fine-grained evaluation. Building upon Teach VLM, we propose the Teach-and-Repeat paradigm, where the generated operational knowledge serves as an interpretable procedural reference to guide downstream screen-based execution agents. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Teach VLM significantly outperforms strong VLM baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance in operation semantics prediction. Furthermore, experiments in Android World show that our paradigm yields consistent Task Success Rate improvements for downstream agents. Together, Teach VLM and the Teach-and-Repeat paradigm offer a practical pathway from raw demonstrations to reusable task automation.
Yudong Zhang, Lei Hu, Daoyang Liu +4
Jun 10, 2026cs.CR

CAPED: Context-Aware Privacy Exposure Defense for Mobile GUI Agents

Screenshot-based mobile GUI agents can operate ordinary smartphone apps through the same visual interface as a human user, but this capability also turns every screen observation into a privacy boundary. During normal task execution, screenshots may expose contacts, messages, photos, files, recommendations, health cues, and other sensitive context that is unrelated to the user's request. We call this problem incidental visual privacy exposure. It is difficult to address with existing defenses: text anonymization misses many visual and inferential cues, while generic privacy masking can remove the evidence and controls that a GUI agent needs to complete the task. This paper presents CAPED, a context-aware pre-upload exposure control layer for mobile GUI agents. CAPED is designed as a phone-side protection layer: before screenshots are released to a remote multimodal agent, it extracts task requirements, uses screen context as a privacy prior, parses visible UI elements, and selectively exposes only content needed for the current task while masking incidental private content. We evaluate CAPED on AndroidWorld for broad task utility and with a controlled 28-task seeded privacy evaluation used as a measurement instrument for trajectory-level incidental leakage. In this seeded evaluation, Full CAPED reduces success-conditioned weighted seeded leakage from 0.766 under raw screenshots to 0.268 while preserving high task utility. A broader AndroidWorld run shows a remaining prototype-level utility cost, but the results show that task-driven selective exposure can reduce incidental visual leakage before screenshots are released to a remote GUI agent.
Siyu Shen, Fenghao Xu, Wenrui Diao +1
Jun 9, 2026cs.CL

VISTA: A Versatile Interactive User Simulation Toolkit for Agent Evaluation

Evaluation remains a critical bottleneck for interactive agent development. Existing evaluation methods often rely on static benchmarks, which fail to capture the dynamic, multi-step nature of agentic behavior and struggle to expose meaningful failure modes. While user-simulation-based evaluation offers a promising alternative, existing simulation frameworks suffer from two major limitations. First, they provide limited mechanisms for evaluating the quality and comprehensiveness of simulated interactions, making it difficult to assess whether a simulator sufficiently explores an agent's capabilities and failure modes. Second, most frameworks are restricted to either UI-only actions or API-only actions, limiting their ability to model the full range of realistic user behaviors. To address these limitations, we propose VISTA, a Versatile Interactive user Simulation Toolkit for Agent evaluation. Our toolkit includes a suite of six metrics for measuring the realism, capability coverage, and interaction effectiveness of simulated interactions. In addition, we develop a hybrid user simulator that integrates both UI-based interactions and API-based interactions, enabling more realistic and comprehensive evaluation across diverse interactive environments. We evaluate VISTA in e-commerce shopping and education customer service settings and demonstrate that it produces more realistic and comprehensive evaluations than existing methods.
Yunan Lu, Ryan Shea, Yusen Zhang +1
Jun 9, 2026cs.AI

Workflow-GYM: Towards Long-Horizon Evaluation of Computer-use Agentic tasks in Real-World Professional Fields

Recent years have witnessed the rapid evolution of AI agents toward handling increasingly complex, real-world tasks. However, existing benchmarks rarely evaluate whether agents can operate graphical user interfaces to complete long-horizon, high-value professional workflows across diverse domains. Current GUI benchmarks still predominantly focus on general-purpose software, relatively simple applications, and short-horizon tasks, leaving it largely unknown whether modern agents can follow user instructions to autonomously operate domain-specific professional software and accomplish economically valuable work in an end-to-end manner. To bridge this gap, we introduce Workflow-GYM, a benchmark for long-horizon GUI tasks centered on professional domains and specialized software environments. Through extensive experiments on state-of-the-art models, we find that even the strongest models achieve only slightly above 30% success rates, highlighting that professional long-horizon GUI workflows remain highly challenging for current GUI agents. Further analysis reveals that current agents struggle to maintain long-horizon workflow consistency, frequently exhibiting workflow stage omission, error propagation, objective drift, and insufficient understanding of professional software environments. Our findings provide important insights into the limitations of current agent systems and suggest key directions for the next generation of GUI-agent research.
Liya Zhu, Jingzhe Ding, Jian Zhang +63
Jun 9, 2026cs.CV

GUI-AC: Enhancing Continual Learning in GUI Agents

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) serve as the dominant medium for human-computer interaction, yet building GUI agents that generalize across the vast diversity of real-world interface environments, with the same flexibility and robustness that humans naturally exhibit, remains unsolved. Notably, GUI data are inherently non-stationary: the continual emergence of previously unseen interface instances (e.g., novel domains and resolutions) induces persistent distribution shifts, significantly impeding the continual learning of existing GUI agents. Reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) has attracted considerable attention as a promising approach. Nevertheless, RFT exhibits pronounced instability in its grounding capability, manifested as sharp reward discontinuities and high-variance oscillations. The imbalanced distribution of rollout outcomes introduces substantial noise into advantage estimation, leading to policy overconfidence. The fixed clipping bound suppresses the increase in policy probabilities needed to adapt to new distributions, leading to a collapse in exploration capacity. To address these challenges, we propose GUI-AC, a method that enhances the continual learning capability of GUI agents. GUI-AC introduces grounding certainty to support two core mechanisms: (i) Adaptive Advantage, which down-weights noisy advantage estimates to prevent policy overconfidence; and (ii) Dynamic Clipping, which relaxes the clipping bound to encourage exploration range. Extensive experiments show that these mechanisms jointly improve performance, enabling our method to surpass state-of-the-art baselines. Code is available anonymously at https://github.com/Can-Lin/GUI-AC.
Can Lin, Tao Feng, Hangjie Yuan +3
Jun 5, 2026cs.AI

StainFlow: Entity-Stain Tracking and Evidence Linking for Process Rewards in GUI Agents

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a promising approach for improving GUI Agents in long-horizon, stochastic digital environments, but trajectory-level success feedback is too sparse to provide reliable credit assignment for intermediate exploration steps. To mitigate this issue, recent studies introduce Process Reward Models (PRMs), which provide finer-grained training feedback through global milestone verification or local step-level evaluation. However, these methods still suffer from two level-specific limitations: global milestone decomposition is subjective and singular, making it difficult to accommodate the multiple valid execution paths in real GUI tasks, while fixed local judging windows may miss long-range key evidence or dilute the decision signal with irrelevant frames. Inspired by stain-tracing mechanisms in network flow analysis, we propose StainFlow, an entity-stain-flow process reward model for GUI Agents. To reduce the subjectivity of global partitioning, we introduce the Global Entity Stain Tracking module, which extracts visually verifiable task entities and tracks how their stain concentrations and states evolve along the trajectory, allowing task phases to be objectively separated by changes in the entity evidence flow. To improve the accuracy of local verification, we introduce the Local Stain Evidence Linking module. Centered on the triggering entities of each candidate key node, it retrieves relevant steps based on their stain concentrations and state changes, and dynamically constructs high-density evidence windows for verifying true key nodes. Extensive experiments on AndroidWorld and OGRBench show that StainFlow relatively improves online RL success by 3.2% and trajectory completion judgment accuracy by 1.8%.
Haojie Hao, Longkun Hao, Yihang Lou +8
Jun 4, 2026cs.LG

MacArena: Benchmarking Computer Use Agents on an Online macOS Environment

Computer-use agents (CUAs) operate graphical user interfaces (GUIs) through vision and control primitives, and their capabilities have advanced rapidly, driven in part by standardized online evaluation benchmarks such as OSWorld, which serve both as evaluation tools and as training environments for reinforcement learning. However, macOS remains underserved in this landscape: the only existing benchmark, macOSWorld, covers a narrow slice of first-party applications with simpler tasks, and runs on x86 virtual machines incompatible with Apple Silicon. We introduce MacArena, a benchmark of 421 manually verified tasks spanning 50 applications that combines a curated port of OSWorld tasks, content sourced from macOSWorld, and 49 new macOS-native tasks, all running on Apple's native Virtualization framework on Apple Silicon. We argue that macOS presents distinct GUI challenges beyond what Linux-based benchmarks capture, and our evaluation supports this claim: strong model performance on existing benchmarks can reflect familiarity with task distributions rather than genuine cross-platform GUI competence. Notably, model rankings invert between ported and macOS-native tasks, with a leading model trailing by over 26% on the MacArena subset, suggesting that macOS poses a genuinely harder environment for current GUI agents.
Victor Muryn, Maksym Shamrai, Sofiia Mazepa +1
Jun 4, 2026cs.AI

PerceptUI: LLM Agents as Human-Aligned Synthetic Users for UI/UX Evaluation

User interface (UI) and user experience (UX) evaluation is central to product development, yet reliable feedback still relies on recruiting human participants or running online A/B tests, making early-stage iteration slow and costly. In light of this, recent work has explored Multimodal Large Language Models as proxy evaluators. However, existing approaches either produce surface-level critiques or a judgment that reflects the model's own biases rather than the genuine response of a particular user. We introduce PerceptUI, a framework for persona-conditioned UI/UX evaluation that predicts how a specific user would answer interface-related questions and produces natural-language rationales. PerceptUI is trained in two stages: (i) contrastive reflection fine-tuning distills teacher-generated rationales by extracting lessons from human decisions, and (ii) a reflective prompt-evolution step from the model's own failure traces. Across multiple domains and datasets, PerceptUI achieves human-level realism, generalizes to unseen questions and personas, and yields population-level response distributions.
Nicolas Bougie, Xiaotong Ye, Gian Maria Marconi +1
Jun 3, 2026cs.CV

Benchmarking Living-Screen-Native GUI Agents on Short-Video Platforms

GUI agents today assume a static screen, where the world is frozen between two actions. However, real interfaces such as short-video applications violate this assumption, as their content keeps playing, and a competent user must decide what to watch and for how long. We formalize this task as Living-Screen-Native GUI agents and introduce LivingScreen, the first benchmark instantiating it on short-video platforms, with a faithful browser-based environment, a three-tier task suite, and metrics that jointly score accuracy and information efficiency. Evaluating extensive frontier models, we find that none reaches the human cost-accuracy performance, and that their dominant failure mode is over- and under-observation, pointing to observation control as a missing capability axis for future GUI agents. All data and code will be available at https://github.com/BITHLP/LivingScreen.
Jiashu Yao, Heyan Huang, Daiqing Wu +5
Jun 2, 2026cs.AI

MedCUA-Bench: A Screenshot-Only Benchmark for Clinical Computer-Use Agents

Computer-use agents could automate repetitive screen-based clinical work, but their reliability in medical graphical user interfaces remains largely unvalidated. Existing benchmarks focus on general web or desktop tasks and underrepresent medical software, which requires domain knowledge, exhibits markedly different UI design from mainstream applications, lacks public testing environments, and demands safety validation beyond task completion. We introduce MedCUA-Bench, an interactive benchmark for clinical computer-use agents. It covers 18 clinical scenarios across 10 medical domains, reconstructed from real product manuals and open-source medical systems to capture authentic clinical interfaces while avoiding licensing and privacy constraints. Each task ships with paired intent- and step-level goals to disentangle clinical reasoning from UI execution, and is evaluated by a deterministic checker over task completion and five clinical safety dimensions. Across 23 agents, the best closed-source model reaches 54.2% strict success, while all models remain below 9% on the real OpenEMR. Open-source agents average only 2.5%, with the best reaching 16.2%. MedCUA-Bench exposes the gap between current agents and reliable clinical software use, providing a reproducible testbed for future research.
Jia Yu, Zilong Wang, Xinyang Jiang +2
Jun 1, 2026cs.CV

STaR-KV: Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Re-weighting for KV Cache Compression in GUI Vision-Language Models

Vision-language-model-based graphical user interface (GUI) agents have shown broad automation capabilities, yet deployment is bottlenecked by a key-value (KV) cache that grows linearly with interaction steps. For instance, UI-TARS-1.5-7B consumes 76 GB of GPU memory on merely five screenshots, approaching the capacity of mainstream 80 GB accelerators. Existing KV compression methods share two structural assumptions: aggregating visual-token importance into a single shared saliency map, and applying a fixed top-B cutoff to the fused score distribution. Pilot measurements refute both: spatial specialization lives at the attention-subspace level and migrates across layers, while the score distribution drifts in shape along a trajectory. We propose STaR-KV (Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Re-weighting), a training-free KV cache compression framework that calibrates token importance along three axes: (i) subspace-aware scoring driven by online spatial mutual information; (ii) a temporal stability discount that suppresses redundant cache entries from persistently attended subspaces; and (iii) an entropy-derived temperature that adaptively reshapes the score distribution. Across four GUI benchmarks, STaR-KV achieves the strongest average accuracy among state-of-the-art KV compression methods (e.g., GUIKV, SnapKV) at matched budgets, with no compression-stage FLOPs overhead (-0.07%) and cutting peak GPU memory by nearly 40% at a 20% KV-cache budget. Code is available at https://github.com/kawhiiiileo/STaR-KV.
Yuhang Han, Wenzheng Yang, Yujie Chen +4
May 29, 2026cs.CY

Comparing LLM-Based Conversational and Graphical Interfaces for Industrial Decision Tasks: An Exploratory Mixed-Methods Study

The use of Generative AI Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) as a new way to access and analyze data is growing in all sectors, and the industrial one is no exception. There, large amounts of data produced by IoT devices are flowing through user interfaces and may require them a new adaptation to the new analyses needs of decision-makers. LLM-based CUIs are promising a new way to directly interact with those data through the directness of natural language and without the learning costs that every GUI design has. Moreover, the capabilities of LLMs and their agency open up the possibility to automate some tasks and help with the reasoning during decision-making activities. But are this promises well founded? We try to scope this general question with a mixed-approach study comparing a state-of-the-art dashboard with a conversational agent. A total of 20 participants used both interfaces to complete four simulated industrial decision tasks of varying complexity. We combined measures of mental workload, completion time, and decision accuracy with a post-study questionnaire and semi-structured interviews analyzed through thematic analysis. The findings suggest that the conversational agent can reduce interactional effort by supporting more direct access to information, while the dashboard remains valuable for overview and verification. However, these benefits may vary across tasks and require validation through larger-scale studies.
Roberto Figliè, Simone Caputo, Alan Serrano +2
May 29, 2026cs.CV

GUI-C2^2: Coarse-to-Fine GUI Grounding via Difficulty-Aware Reinforcement Learning

Existing agentic reinforcement learning methods for GUI grounding have limitations at two levels. At the data level, current approaches typically treat all training samples equally, although their training value to the baseline model varies with difficulty. Overlooking this can greatly reduce training efficiency or even cause collapse. At the strategy level, existing frameworks struggle to balance the trade-off between cropping larger regions for sufficient context and smaller ones for reduced redundancy, a tension inherent to tool-augmented grounding agents. In addition, overly complex decision-making is difficult for small-parameter models and significantly increases inference time. To address these issues, at the data level, we propose GUI-D, a data mining and difficulty scoring pipeline that identifies the training-worthy samples by proper testing and assigns difficulty scores to guide subsequent training weights. At the strategy level, we propose GUI-C2^2, which employs an area-gated coarse-to-fine refinement mechanism that progressively narrows the visual field via model-internal uncertainty signals, adaptively reserving context for large targets while amplifying precision for small ones, reinforced by improvement-aware stage rewards that ensure each refinement genuinely advances grounding. Meanwhile, we simplify the decision-making process to greatly reduce additional inference time. Finally, extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code and data will be publicly available.
Junlong Li, Chao Hao, Lap-Pui Chau +1
May 28, 2026cs.AI

Syll: Open-Source Personal Automation with Cross-Surface Execution

Personal AI agents must increasingly operate across APIs, shells, web surfaces, and desktop GUIs, yet many systems remain tuned to a single interface and offer limited support for user teaching and auditability. We present Syll, an open-source, self-hosted multimodal agent harness that unifies MCP/API tools, CLI execution, and visual GUI control in a modular runtime, enabling agents to coordinate computer use across heterogeneous interfaces while streamlining how users and agents exchange information. At the core of Syll is a bidirectional user-agent interaction layer: users teach procedures through direct demonstration, which Syll compiles into reusable skills; agent execution is translated back into multimodal evidence -- logs, keyframes, and approval checkpoints -- for inspection and control. Syll further externalizes memory, skills, routines, and governance as editable local artifacts, supporting straightforward inspection, extension, and downstream development. Our implementation has been validated on production desktop applications including Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Audition, Stardew Valley, macOS Finder and others. We report mechanism-oriented studies that validate multimodal routing, teachable GUI replay, and persistent local artifacts. We hope Syll can serve as a practical open-source foundation for personal automation that users can teach, inspect, and continuously extend.
Bo Zhang, Borui Zhang, Chenghao Jiang +5
May 28, 2026cs.AI

UI-KOBE: Knowledge-Oriented Behavior Exploration for Lightweight Graph-Guided GUI Agents

Recent advances in mobile GUI agents have shown strong potential for automating mobile tasks, but most effective systems still depend on large vision-language models for screenshot understanding and long-horizon planning. Small GUI agents that can be deployed directly on mobile devices are more attractive for practical use, offering lower inference cost and better protection of sensitive on-device information. However, due to limited model capacity, such lightweight agents remain unreliable when planning and executing GUI tasks end-to-end from screenshots alone. We propose Knowledge-Oriented Behavior Exploration (\textbf{UI-KOBE}), a framework that improves lightweight mobile GUI agents with reusable app-specific graph knowledge. UI-KOBE first autonomously explores a mobile application and constructs an app knowledge graph, where nodes represent distinct UI states and edges represent executable transitions. At runtime, a lightweight GUI agent uses the graph as external guidance: given a user task and the current screenshot, it identifies the current graph node and selects among self-loop actions, neighboring transitions, task completion, or fallback free actions associated with that node. By supporting runtime decisions with app-specific graph guidance, UI-KOBE reduces the burden of end-to-end GUI planning and helps lightweight models perform mobile GUI tasks more effectively, offering a practical step toward efficient, interpretable, and privacy-conscious on-device GUI agents.
Yuxiang Chai, Han Xiao, Xinyu Fu +3
May 28, 2026cs.SE

GUITestScape: Towards Open-set Evaluation on Exploratory GUI Testing

Exploratory GUI testing is a particularly demanding setting for MLLM agents: without predefined test scripts, an agent must autonomously navigate an application and discover defects through its own interaction. However, current evaluation falls short on two fronts. First, existing benchmarks focus almost exclusively on interaction defects, leaving display defects outside the evaluation frame. Second, evaluation protocols are bound to predefined defect annotations, collapsing the testing process into a single end-state judgment that conflates qualitatively distinct failure modes. To address these challenges, we present GUITestScape, an interactive benchmark covering 61 real-world Android applications and 508 preset defects spanning interaction and display types, and introduce GUIJudge, an open-set evaluator that decomposes an agent's testing trajectory into independently diagnosable capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that GUIJudge achieves reliable process-aware evaluation beyond predefined annotations, substantially outperforming all baselines. Benchmarking on GUITestScape further reveals that detection remains the critical bottleneck for existing models across both defect types, and that integrating GUIJudge's verifiers into existing agents significantly boosts their detection performance without retraining.
Xiaoyi Chen, Yifei Gao, Yang Xu +3
May 28, 2026cs.CV

Recovering Policy-Induced Errors: Benchmarking and Trajectory Synthesis for Robust GUI Agents

While GUI agents have advanced rapidly, they often lack the robustness to recover from their own errors, hindering real-world deployment. To bridge this gap at both the evaluation and data levels, we introduce GUI-RobustEval and propose Robustness-driven Trajectory Synthesis. GUI-RobustEval contains 1,2161,216 executable test cases that systematically measure error recovery capabilities across a broad and realistic spectrum of error modes. At the data level, RoTS is a scalable synthesis framework that creates 800k800k high-quality data via a tree-based pipeline that proactively discovers diverse error modes and synthesizes corresponding recovery steps. Our two models, RoTS-7B and RoTS-32B, fine-tuned on our dataset, both demonstrate significant gains on GUI-RobustEval and traditional GUI benchmarks. Notably, RoTS-32B achieves state-of-the-art performance on OSWorld, with a 47.4%47.4\% success rate and a 33.8%33.8\% All-Pass@4 score, suggesting that improved long-horizon error recovery ability contributes to both robustness and overall performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/RoTS.
Tianpeng Bu, Xin Liu, Qihua Chen +7
May 28, 2026cs.CL

STAMP: Training Explicit Memory for Mobile GUI Agents in Controllable and Scalable Virtual Environments

Mobile GUI agents excel at immediate reactive control but frequently fail in realistic, long-horizon tasks that require memory. This failure stems from a fundamental conflict between limited context windows and token-heavy screenshots. To save the limited context, agents must progressively discard older visual history, permanently losing crucial transient information. Furthermore, existing action-centric datasets fail to teach agents what or when to explicitly memorize, and augmenting static real-world data is prohibitively expensive and lacks interactive verification. To resolve this, we present STAMP, a framework that trains explicit memory in mobile agents through controllable virtual environments, where deterministic memory variables are programmatically injected into synthesized tasks to control what must be memorized, when it should be encoded, and when it must later be retrieved, thereby producing verifiable supervised data at scale and enabling online reinforcement learning through environment-driven reward feedback. Evaluated on our newly introduced Memory-World benchmark, the resulting Stamp-GUI agent achieves state-of-the-art performance among GUI-specialized models and sets a new high watermark on our Memory-World benchmark, demonstrating exceptional memory accuracy and task resilience while maintaining strong general mobile navigation capabilities.
Junyang Wang, Haiyang Xu, Xi Zhang +4
May 27, 2026cs.CR

MaskClaw: Edge-Side Personalized Privacy Arbitration for GUI Agents with Behavior-Driven Skill Evolution

GUI agents rely on screenshots to infer intent and operate across applications, but these screenshots often contain private messages, medical records, payment credentials, and workplace-specific workflows. Privacy decisions in this setting depend on task, recipient, application state, and user role, yet static PII detectors miss these boundaries and cloud-side VLM reasoning can upload the raw screen before deciding what should be protected. We present MaskClaw, an edge-side privacy arbitrator for GUI agents. MaskClaw extracts local visual evidence, retrieves user- and task-specific policy memory, and decides Allow, Mask, or Ask before raw screenshots leave a trusted user- or organization-controlled environment. In five designed skill-evolution scenarios, it turns corrections, cancellations, and edits into reusable privacy skills checked by a sandbox gate. We introduce P-GUI-Evo, a benchmark built from real UI patterns, reconstructed HTML screens, and sanitized labels. Experiments show that pattern matching, cloud reasoning, and routing alone tend to over-confirm, over-mask, or expose raw screenshots under the same protocol. The artifact is available at https://github.com/Theodora-Y/MaskClaw.
Yanqiu Zhao, Dongying Zheng, Kaibo Huang +3
May 27, 2026cs.CL

GUI-CIDER: Mid-training GUI Agents via Causal Internalization and Density-aware Exemplar Reselection

Despite the rapid progress of multimodal large language models in building Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents, their real-world task completion is fundamentally bottlenecked by a lack of world knowledge about GUI operations. Existing solutions typically rely on expensive multi-agent scaffolding or conventional post-training paradigms, such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, post-training only allows agents to implicitly absorb world knowledge through action annotations or reward signals, leading to inefficient trajectory memorization rather than genuine comprehension. Therefore, an approach that enables explicit learning of this knowledge is imperative. To this end, we propose GUI-CIDER, a mid-training method that explicitly internalizes GUI world knowledge through Causal Internalization and Density-aware Exemplar Reselection. GUI-CIDER operates in three stages: (1) data synthesis, which distills static planning and dynamic causal knowledge from GUI trajectories into text; (2) exemplar reselection, which filters the corpus by rewarding causal structures and penalizing semantic redundancy; and (3) mid-training, where the refined data is used to embed the acquired knowledge. Extensive experiments on two GUI knowledge benchmarks and three task completion benchmarks demonstrate that GUI-CIDER consistently improves both the agent's understanding of GUI operations and its task success rates.The codes are available at https://github.com/Wuzheng02/GUI-CIDER.
Zheng Wu, Chengcheng Han, Zhengxi Lu +5
May 27, 2026cs.SE

GUI Agents for Continual Game Generation

Generating a game is not the same as making one that can be played. Despite advances in code generation, existing approaches treat game generation as one-shot translation from prompt to artifact, leaving interaction-level failures undetected. We argue that evaluating and improving game generation requires a player, and study two roles for graphical user interface (GUI) agents in this process: (1) as an objective evaluator, for which we introduce PlaytestArena, a new evaluation environment that pairs 200 browser-based game generation tasks across eight genres with rubrics of expected in-play behaviors, adjudicated by a GUI agent that loads each build in a browser and plays it; and (2) as a subjective playtester, for which we propose Play2Code, where a game agent and a GUI agent operate in a sustained loop with shared memory, turning game generation into a dialogue between coding and playing. Our experiments show that even frontier models struggle to generate playable games directly, while Play2Code achieves a 66.8% rubric pass-rate, improving over single-pass and agentic-coding baselines by 37.1 and 14.6 points respectively. Further analysis shows that GUI playtester feedback is more traceable than a human report, yet idiosyncratic in ways reminiscent of human testers, establishing game playtesting as a critical testbed for interactive code generation. Our project website is available at https://continual-game-generation.vercel.app/.
Yixu Huang, Bo Li, Na Li +8
May 27, 2026cs.CR

MIRAGE: Context-Aware Prompt Injection against Mobile GUI Agents via User-Generated Content

Mobile graphical user interface (GUI) agents driven by vision-language models (VLMs) perceive the screen as rendered pixels and choose actions from what they see, so they cannot reliably separate trusted interface elements from user-generated content. We present MIRAGE (Mobile Injection of Realistic Adversarial GUI Examples), a pipeline that turns benign mobile screenshots into prompt-injection samples by placing attacker-controlled text into ordinary user-generated content regions, without modifying the agent, the application, or the operating system. MIRAGE operates in three stages: a Localizer identifies user-controllable regions on the screenshot, a Generator synthesises context-aware payloads and renders them in the application's native style, and a Curator moderates realism and balances the samples across applications, region types, and attack intents. A key challenge is that an injected screenshot must stay visually indistinguishable from genuine user content while still diverting the agent; we address this by separating the stages that control reach, realism, and distributional balance. On a 1,111-sample benchmark spanning ten applications and eleven attack intents, all five evaluated VLM agents are vulnerable, with attack success rates of 23%-30%, and MIRAGE scores higher on human realism ratings than the strongest prior attack (3.02 versus 2.52 out of 5). We further find that per-sample realism and attack success are uncorrelated, so visual-quality filtering alone cannot reliably defend against this threat.
Ruoqi Guo, Yi Liu, Gelei Deng +7
May 26, 2026cs.CV

AndroidDaily: A Verifiable Benchmark for Mobile GUI Agents on Real-World Closed-Source Applications

The rapid development of GUI foundation models and mobile GUI agents has spurred numerous evaluation benchmarks, yet most rely on simulated environments or open-source applications, leaving real-world closed-source applications largely unevaluated. The core difficulty is that closed-source applications do not expose internal states, making traditional automatic verification inapplicable. To bridge this gap, we introduce AndroidDaily, a large-scale benchmark comprising 350 realistic daily-use tasks across 94 high-frequency Android applications spanning transportation, shopping, local services, entertainment, content creation, social media, and everyday utilities. To enable automatic and verifiable assessment in these opaque environments, we propose Guideline-grounded Reviewer for Automatic Diagnostic Evaluation (GRADE), a process-aware evaluator built on a three-tiered system of observable external guidelines: operational obligations, output quality, and negative constraints. GRADE tracks the agent's visual trajectory against these criteria and produces step-level diagnostic judgments, turning long-horizon, open-ended mobile interactions into verifiable evaluation without relying on hidden internal states. Experiments show that GRADE achieves 87.37% agreement with human evaluators. The strongest model reaches a 62.0% success rate on AndroidDaily, highlighting a substantial gap between current reasoning capabilities and practical execution in realistic mobile workflows.
Yifan Sui, Xin Huang, Hongbing Li +14
May 26, 2026cs.AI

Scaling, Benchmarking, and Reasoning of Vision-Language Agents for Mobile GUI Navigation

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown rapid progress in mobile GUI navigation. This paper presents a systematic study of data scaling, benchmarking, and reasoning for VLM-based agents in this domain. To facilitate rigorous evaluation, we introduce HyperTrack, a large-scale dataset with over 16000 real-world tasks across more than 650 Chinese mobile applications, along with GUIEvalKit, an open-source toolkit for unified benchmarking of VLMs on offline GUI navigation tasks. Using HyperTrack, we analyze the effects of training data scale on both supervised and reinforcement-based finetuning. Our results show that reinforcement-based finetuning consistently outperforms supervised finetuning, particularly in out-of-domain settings, highlighting the synergy between data scaling and reinforcement learning. Leveraging GUIEvalKit, we further benchmark state-of-the-art (SOTA) VLMs and analyze how interaction history and reasoning capabilities influence task completion. Together, HyperTrack and GUIEvalKit provide a comprehensive platform for developing and evaluating VLM agents in mobile GUI navigation tasks.
Heng Qu, Yike Liu, Renren Jin +4
May 26, 2026cs.AI

Darwin Mobile Agent: A Roadmap for Self-Evolution

The goal of artificial intelligence is to create agents capable of general, adaptive behaviour in open-ended environments. Guided by the "Bitter Lesson", we argue that the most effective path toward this goal is to systematically remove human priors and allow intelligence to naturally emerge through interaction with a "Big World" that is orders of magnitude more complex than the agent itself. We propose the mobile Graphical User Interface (GUI) as a practical proxy for such a world and introduce Darwin Mobile Agent, an open-source infrastructure designed as a foundation for autonomous reinforcement learning in this domain. This framework addresses the data-collection bottleneck in real-world mobile interactions by using an asynchronous agent-environment loop across parallel cloud-phone instances. We further propose a conceptual roadmap to systematically remove human priors from three fundamental pillars of a self-evolving agent: task curricula, outcome verification, and memory management. We validate that the Darwin infrastructure provides the stability and scalability required for the first stage of this roadmap: policy optimisation in the GUI domain. This work establishes the practical and theoretical foundation necessary to move toward truly autonomous, self-evolving GUI agents.
Daniel Beechey, Derek Yuen, Jianheng Liu +5
May 26, 2026cs.AI

MobileExplorer: Accelerating On-Device Inference for Mobile GUI Agents via Online Exploration

Mobile graphical user interface (GUI) agents enable AI models to autonomously operate smartphones on behalf of users. However, most existing systems focus primarily on optimizing task accuracy and rely on cloud-hosted models for inference, which introduces privacy concerns and network-dependent latency. As a result, fully on-device deployment of mobile GUI agents remains underexplored. We propose MobileExplorer, a new framework that accelerates on-device inference for vision-based mobile GUI agents via online exploration. The key idea is to exploit the long per-step reasoning time of vision-language models (VLMs) by performing lightweight, parallel exploration of UI elements. During model inference, the agent proactively probes semantically relevant UI elements and records these exploration traces as structured memory. To ensure reliable execution in live mobile environments, we design a two-level rollback mechanism that robustly restores the initial UI state when a fast but naive backtracking strategy fails. The collected exploration traces are then summarized into concise contextual hints and injected into the prompt to enhance the subsequent reasoning step. We evaluate MobileExplorer on multiple off-the-shelf devices using the AndroidWorld benchmark, as well as newly designed, more complex tasks and dynamic on-device environments. MobileExplorer reduces the average number of reasoning steps and end-to-end latency by 23%, while maintaining or improving task success rates by up to 5%. A video demonstration of MobileExplorer performance in the real world is available at https://youtu.be/thK7MJmdlvM .
Runxi Huang, Liyu Zhang, Shengzhong Liu +1
May 25, 2026cs.AI

MobileGym: A Verifiable and Highly Parallel Simulation Platform for Mobile GUI Agent Research

We present MobileGym, a browser-hosted, lightweight, fully controllable environment for everyday mobile use, targeting interaction fidelity without replicating proprietary backends. It enables two capabilities previously out of reach for everyday apps: verifiable outcome signals through deterministic state-based judging over structured JSON state, and scalable online RL through low-cost parallel rollouts. The full environment state is captured, configured, forked, and compared as structured JSON, and a single server can host hundreds of parallel instances, with about 400 MB memory per instance and about 3 s cold start. A layered state model and a declarative task-definition framework keep state programmability and task creation practical at scale, and a single programmatic judging mechanism delivers both deterministic evaluation verdicts and dense RL rewards. The accompanying MobileGym-Bench provides 416 parameterized task templates, including 256 test and 160 train templates, over 28 apps, with deterministic judges and a structured AnswerSheet protocol that avoids free-text matching failures. In a Sim-to-Real case study, GRPO on Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct gains +12.8 percentage points on the 256-task test set, and on a 59-task real-device signal subset, real-device execution retains 95.1% of the simulation-side training gain. Project page: https://mobilegym.github.io.
Dingbang Wu, Rui Hao, Haiyang Wang +8
May 24, 2026cs.AI

ScaleWoB: Guiding GUI Agents with Coding Agents via Large-Scale Environmental Synthesis

GUI agents powered by large language models are advancing rapidly, creating urgent needs for evaluation and training based on realistic environments. However, directly doing so in real-world environments introduces some challenges that cannot be overlooked. Real-world environments are complex and uncontrollable, making it difficult to construct verifiable rewards and to save or reset states. Existing works prioritize reproducibility but are often limited to open-source apps or file-operation tasks for reliable reward building, leaving a persistent gap from real-world usage. Furthermore, relying on virtual machines or docker images demand high resource requirements and suffer from slow response speeds, which limit the efficiency. We present \sys, a framework that could produce high-fidelity synthesized interactive environments for GUI agents across platforms with verifiable rewards. These environments behave as backend-free webpages accessible via URL, requiring near-zero setup and low resource cost, making the approach suitable for both large-scale evaluation and downstream agent training. We support multiple GUI platforms including mobile, desktop, and automotive/in-vehicle interfaces based on the same pipeline, covering 100+ environments and 1000+ verifiable tasks. Among them, 120 challenging tasks across 63 simulated mobile applications are released as a fully synthesized mobile GUI agent benchmark. Experiment results on five state-of-the-art mobile GUI agents reveal substantial headroom -- the average success rate is only 27.92%, dropping to 17.82% on long-horizon subset -- while humans reach 92.08%. A comparison against real-world sample tasks shows that assessments made in our synthetic environments generalize to real apps. The project website is at https://scalewob.github.io.
Guohong Liu, Jialei Ye, Pengzhi Gao +4
May 20, 2026cs.AI

AutoRPA: Efficient GUI Automation through LLM-Driven Code Synthesis from Interactions

Large Language Model (LLM) based agents have demonstrated proficiency in multi-step interactions with graphical user interfaces (GUIs). While most research focuses on improving single-task performance, practical scenarios often involve repetitive GUI tasks for which invoking LLM reasoning repeatedly, i.e., the ReAct paradigm, is inefficient. Prior to LLMs, traditional Robotic Process Automation (RPA) offers runtime efficiency but demands significant manual effort to develop and maintain. To bridge this gap, we propose AutoRPA, a framework that automatically distills the decision logic of ReAct-style agents into robust RPA functions. AutoRPA introduces two core innovations: (1) A translator-builder pipeline, where a translator agent converts hard-coded ReAct actions into soft-coded procedures, and a builder agent synthesizes robust RPA functions via retrieval-augmented generation over multiple trajectories; (2) A hybrid repair strategy during code verification, combining RPA execution with ReAct-based fallback for iterative refinement. Experiments across multiple GUI environments demonstrate that RPA functions generated by AutoRPA successfully solve similar tasks while reducing token usage by 82% to 96%, significantly improving runtime efficiency and reusability.
Minghao Chen, Xinyi Hu, Zhou Yu +1
May 19, 2026cs.CV

CutVerse: A Compositional GUI Agents Benchmark for Media Post-Production Editing

While GUI agents have made significant progress in web navigation and basic operating system tasks, their capabilities in professional creative workflows remain largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce Cutverse, a benchmark designed to systematically evaluate autonomous GUI agents in realistic media post-production environments. We curate expert demonstrations across 7 professional applications (e.g., Premiere Pro, Photoshop), covering 186 complex, long-horizon tasks grounded in authentic editing workflows, involving dense multimodal interfaces and tightly coupled interaction sequences. To support scalable evaluation, we develop a lightweight parser that transforms raw screen recordings and low-level interaction logs into structured, compositional GUI action trajectories with precise grounding. Extensive evaluations reveal that existing agents achieve only 36.0% task success on realistic media editing tasks, underscoring the challenges posed by complex, long-horizon media post-production workflows in our benchmark.While current models demonstrate promising spatial grounding, multimodal alignment, and coordinated action execution, they remain limited in long-horizon reliability and domain-specific planning.
Haobo Hu, Xiangwu Guo, Zhiheng Chen +4
May 19, 2026cs.AI

AQuaUI: Visual Token Reduction for GUI Agents with Adaptive Quadtrees

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have recently emerged as promising backbones for GUI-agent models, where high-resolution GUI screenshots are introduced to the prompts at each iteration step. However, these screenshots exhibit highly non-uniform spatial information density: large regions may carry little information and are visually homogeneous, while key text and icons may require high visual fidelity. Existing approaches to this problem either require additional training or rely on attention-based token compression, ignoring the structured layout and spatial redundancy of GUI screenshots. To fill the gap, this paper proposes AquaUI, a training-free inference-time token reduction method for GUI agent models that utilizes the non-uniform information density in screenshots. AQuaUI constructs an adaptive quadtree on each screenshot input and keeps one representative merged token per leaf of the quadtree. AQuaUI preserves the spatial positions of retained tokens throughout the pipeline to ensure that all position-encoding stages remain consistent. To further improve temporal consistency across multi-step GUI interactions, we propose a conditional quadtree algorithm that leverages the continuity between consecutive screenshots within a single request. Specifically, it refines the current quadtree using previous quadtrees as references, helping preserve fine-grained regions across static or mildly shifted GUI states. We implement AQuaUI on state-of-the-art GUI agent models and conduct experiments on standard grounding and navigational benchmarks. AQuaUI consistently shows improved accuracy-efficiency trade-offs over prior baselines. Notably, on GUI-Owl-1.5-32B-Instruct, AQuaUI achieves up to 13.22% speedup and 29.52% fewer visual tokens while retaining 99.06% of full-token performance, suggesting that the spatial redundancy of GUI screenshots can be exploited at inference without retraining.
Yuankai Li, Tinghui Zhu, Ha Min Son +3
May 18, 2026cs.CV

MementoGUI: Learning Agentic Multimodal Memory Control for Long-Horizon GUI Agents

Recent GUI agents have made substantial progress in visual grounding and action prediction, yet they remain brittle in long-horizon tasks that require maintaining task state across many interface transitions. Existing agents typically rely on raw history replay or text-only memory, which either overwhelms the model with redundant screenshots or discards localized visual evidence needed for future decisions. To address these limitations, we introduce \textbf{MementoGUI}, a plug-in agentic memory framework that equips MLLM-based GUI agents with \textbf{MementoCore}, a learned controller for online memory selection, compression, and retrieval. Rather than treating interaction history as a fixed context, MementoGUI formulates long-horizon GUI control as an online memory-control problem: working memory selectively preserves task-relevant interface events with textual summaries and ROI-level visual evidence, while episodic memory retrieves reusable past trajectories through learned relevance selection. MementoCore modularizes memory control into specialized operators for step processing, memory compression, episodic writing, and episodic selection, enabling plug-in memory augmentation without finetuning the GUI agent backbone. We further develop a scalable data curation pipeline that converts computer-use trajectories into memory-controller training data, introduce \textbf{MementoGUI-Bench} for evaluating long-horizon decision-making in GUI agents, and design MLLM-based metrics for semantic action matching, task progress, and memory consistency. Experiments on GUI-Odyssey, MM-Mind2Web, and MementoGUI-Bench show that MementoGUI consistently improves GUI agents over no-history, history-replay, and text-only memory baselines, with larger MementoCore backbones further strengthening memory-augmented GUI control.
Ziyun Zeng, Hang Hua, Bocheng Zou +3
May 18, 2026cs.AI

DocOS: Towards Proactive Document-Guided Actions in GUI Agents

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.
Jingjing Liu, Ziye Huang, Zihao Cheng +6
May 17, 2026cs.OS

TClone: Low-Latency Forking of Live GUI Environments for Computer-Use Agents

Computer-use agents increasingly operate inside live personal workspaces, where their actions can modify files, applications, GUI state, credentials, and authenticated sessions. This creates a tension between safety and quality: agents need isolation and rollback to avoid damaging user state, but also need fast branching to support speculative execution and parallel search. Existing VMs, containers, and checkpoint/restore systems can isolate or recover workloads, but they do not provide low-latency versioning of a full interactive workspace. We present TClone, a forkable personal workspace system for computer-use agents. TClone enables a live GUI workspace to be snapshotted, forked into isolated branches, rolled back, and selectively committed or merged. Its design separates fast branch creation from durable checkpointing, using sibling containers, copy-on-write memory sharing, filesystem versioning, GUI-local execution, and asynchronous checkpointing. In our end-to-end agent-loop measurement, TClone reduces total task latency by 1.9x and 1.5x over KVM and CRIU. By making workspace versioning a first-class systems primitive, TClone supports safer and higher-quality agent execution over real personal computing environments.
Yutong Huang, Vikranth Srivatsa, Alex Asch +2
May 16, 2026cs.LG

SE-GA: Memory-Augmented Self-Evolution for GUI Agents

Autonomous Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents often struggle with multi-step tasks due to constrained context windows and static policies that fail to adapt to dynamic environments. To address these limitations, this work proposes the Self-Evolving GUI Agent (SE-GA), a novel framework that integrates hierarchical memory structures with an iterative self-improvement mechanism. At the core of our approach is Test-Time Memory Extension (TTME), which facilitates long-term planning by dynamically retrieving episodic, semantic, and experiential memories to provide salient contexts during inference. To ensure continuous learning, we introduce Memory-Augmented Self-Evolution (MASE), which is a training pipeline that adopts the data collected by TTME to stabilize and enhance the agent's foundational policy. Extensive evaluations across both offline and online benchmarks demonstrate SE-GA achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching success rates of 89.0% on ScreenSpot and 75.8% on the challenging AndroidControl-High dataset. Furthermore, significant improvements on the AndroidWorld benchmark highlight the superior generalization to dynamic environments. Open source code: https://github.com/jinshilong-dev/SE-GA
Shilong Jin, Lanjun Wang, Zhuosheng Zhang
May 15, 2026cs.AI

PAGER: Bridging the Semantic-Execution Gap in Point-Precise Geometric GUI Control

Large vision-language models have significantly advanced GUI agents, enabling executable interaction across web, mobile, and desktop interfaces. Yet these gains largely rely on a forgiving region-tolerant paradigm, where many nearby pixels inside the same component remain valid. Precise geometric construction breaks this assumption: actions must land on points in continuous canvas space rather than tolerant regions. Because geometric primitives carry ontological dependencies, a local coordinate error can induce cascading topological failures that distort downstream objects and invalidate the final construction. We identify this regime as precision-sensitive GUI tasks, requiring point-level accuracy, geometry-aware verification, and robustness to dependency-driven error propagation. To benchmark it, we introduce PAGE Bench, with 4,906 problems and over 224K process-supervised, pixel-level GUI actions. We further propose PAGER, a topology-aware agent that decomposes construction into dependency-structured planning and pixel-level execution. Pixel-grounded supervised tuning establishes executable action grammar, while precision-aligned reinforcement learning mitigates rollout-induced exposure bias through state-conditioned geometric feedback. Experiments reveal a pronounced Semantic-Execution Gap: general multimodal models can exceed 88% action type accuracy yet remain below 6% task success. PAGER closes this gap, delivering 4.1x higher task success than the strongest evaluated general baseline and raising step success rate from below 9% for GUI-specialized agents to over 62%, establishing a new state of the art for point-precise GUI control.
Jingxuan Wei, Xi Bai, Shan Liu +8
May 15, 2026cs.AI

DRS-GUI: Dynamic Region Search for Training-Free GUI Grounding

GUI agents powered by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capability in understanding and executing user instructions. However, accurately grounding instruction-relevant elements from high-resolution screenshots cluttered with irrelevant UI components remains challenging for existing approaches. Inspired by how humans dynamically adjust their perceptual scope to locate task-related regions on complex screens, we propose DRS-GUI, a training-free dynamic region search framework for GUI grounding that can be seamlessly integrated into existing MLLMs. DRS-GUI introduces a lightweight UI Perceptor that performs three human-like perceptual actions (Focus, Shift, and Scatter) to progressively explore the interface and generate region proposals. To dynamically schedule these actions, we further design an Action Planner based on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). A region quality reward is employed to evaluate and select the highly instruction-relevant region, efficiently pruning redundant UI elements. Experiments demonstrate that DRS-GUI yields a 14% improvement on ScreenSpot-Pro for general and GUI-specific MLLMs (Qwen2.5-VL-7B and UGround-V1-7B), significantly enhancing grounding performance and generalization.
Yichao Liu, Huawen Shen, Liu Yu +3
May 14, 2026cs.CL

Video2GUI: Synthesizing Large-Scale Interaction Trajectories for Generalized GUI Agent Pretraining

Recent advances in multimodal large language models have driven growing interest in graphical user interface (GUI) agents, yet their generalization remains constrained by the scarcity of large-scale training data spanning diverse real-world applications. Existing datasets rely heavily on costly manual annotations and are typically confined to narrow domains. To address this challenge, we propose Video2GUI, a fully automated framework that extracts grounded GUI interaction trajectories directly from unlabeled Internet videos. Video2GUI employs a coarse-to-fine filtering strategy to identify high-quality GUI tutorial videos and convert them into structured agent trajectories. Applying this pipeline to 500 million video metadata entries, we construct WildGUI, a large-scale dataset containing 12 million interaction trajectories spanning over 1,500 applications and websites. Pre-training Qwen2.5-VL and Mimo-VL on WildGUI yields consistent improvements of 5-20% across multiple GUI grounding and action benchmarks, matching or surpassing state-of-the-art performance. We will release both the WildGUI dataset and the Video2GUI pipeline to support future research of GUI agents.
Weimin Xiong, Shuhao Gu, Bowen Ye +5
May 14, 2026cs.LG

Beyond Binary: Reframing GUI Critique as Continuous Semantic Alignment

Test-Time Scaling (TTS), which samples multiple candidate actions and ranks them via a Critic Model, has emerged as a promising paradigm for generalist GUI agents. Its efficacy thus hinges on the critic's fine-grained ranking ability. However, existing GUI critic models uniformly adopt binary classification. Our motivational analysis of these models exposes a severe entanglement: scores for valid actions and plausible-but-invalid distractors become indistinguishable. We attribute this failure to two structural defects: Affordance Collapse--the hierarchical affordance space is compressed into 0/1 labels; and Noise Sensitivity--binary objectives overfit to noisy decision boundaries. To resolve this, we introduce BBCritic (Beyond-Binary Critic), a paradigm shift grounded in the Functional Equivalence Hypothesis. Through two-stage contrastive learning, BBCritic aligns instructions and actions in a shared Affordance Space, recovering the hierarchical structure that binary supervision flattens. We also present BBBench (Beyond-Binary Bench), the first GUI critic benchmark that pairs a dense action space with a hierarchical four-level taxonomy, enabling fine-grained ranking evaluation. Experimental results show that BBCritic-3B, trained without any extra annotation, outperforms 7B-parameter SOTA binary models. It demonstrates strong zero-shot transferability across platforms and tasks, supporting our methodological view: GUI critique is fundamentally a metric-learning problem, not a classification one.
Yuchen Sun, Pei Fu, Shaojie Zhang +6
May 13, 2026cs.CV

WinDeskGround: A Benchmark for Robust GUI Grounding in Complex Multi-Window Desktop Environments

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have revolutionized GUI automation, yet their efficacy is largely established on idealized, single-layer interfaces. This paper identifies a critical reliability gap: state-of-the-art agents face distinct robustness challenges in real-world desktop environments characterized by multi-window stacking, occlusion, and visual clutter. To address this, we introduce WinDeskGround, a novel benchmark and synthesis framework tailored for evaluating GUI grounding robustness. Unlike static datasets, our framework parametrically generates complex desktop scenarios by controlling window occlusion, layout density, and semantic similarity, thereby simulating the distribution shifts of authentic workflows. We construct a diverse meta-dataset of 1,356 high-fidelity instruction-target pairs and conduct comprehensive evaluations of five leading MLLMs. Our results demonstrate that while top-tier agents excel in simplified settings, their accuracy declines under partial occlusion. WinDeskGround provides a valuable benchmark to facilitate the assessment and advancement of GUI agent robustness in realistic environments. The code is available at https://github.com/ZZZhr-1/WinDeskGround.
Haoren Zhao, Tianyi Chen, Zhen Wang
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
May 11, 2026cs.AI

How Mobile World Model Guides GUI Agents?

Recent advances in vision-language models have enabled mobile GUI agents to perceive visual interfaces and execute user instructions, but reliable prediction of action consequences remains critical for long-horizon and high-risk interactions. Existing mobile world models provide either text-based or image-based future states, yet it remains unclear which representation is useful, whether generated rollouts can replace real environments, and how test-time guidance helps agents of different strengths. To answer the above questions, we filter and annotate mobile world-model data, then train world models across four modalities: delta text, full text, diffusion-based images, and renderable code. These models achieve SoTA performance on both MobileWorldBench and Code2WorldBench. Furthermore, by evaluating their downstream utility on AITZ, AndroidControl, and AndroidWorld, we obtain three findings. First, renderable code reconstruction achieves high in-distribution fidelity and provides effective multimodal supervision for data construction, while text-based feedback is more robust for online out-of-distribution (OOD) execution. Second, world-model-generated trajectories can provide transferable interaction experience in the training process and improve agents' end-to-end task performance, although these data do not preserve the original distribution. Last, for overconfident mobile agents with low action entropy, posterior self-reflection provides limited gains, suggesting that world models are more effective as prior perception or training supervision than as universal post-hoc verifiers.
Weikai Xu, Kun Huang, Yunren Feng +10
May 10, 2026cs.CV

What Happens Before Decoding? Prefill Determines GUI Grounding in VLMs

Existing training-free approaches for GUI grounding often rely on multiple inference runs, such as iterative cropping or candidate aggregation, to identify target elements. Despite this additional computation, each forward pass still independently interprets the instruction and parses the visual layout, without enabling progressive interaction among visual tokens. In this paper, we study what happens during GUI grounding in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and identify a previously overlooked bottleneck. We show that grounding follows a two-stage paradigm: the prefill stage determines candidate UI elements, while the decoding stage subsequently refines the final coordinates. This asymmetry establishes prefill as the critical step, as errors in candidate selection cannot be effectively corrected during decoding. Based on this observation, we propose Re-Prefill, a training-free method that revisits inference by introducing an attention-guided second prefill stage to refine target selection. Specifically, visual tokens that consistently receive high attention from the query position, i.e., the final token, across layers are extracted as a preliminary target hypothesis and appended to the input, together with the instruction hidden states, enabling the model to deeply re-think its decision before coordinate generation. Experiments across four VLMs and five benchmarks, including ScreenSpot-Pro, ScreenSpot-V2, OSWorld-G, UI-Vision, and MMBench-GUI, demonstrate consistent improvements without additional training, with gains of up to 4.3% on ScreenSpot-Pro. Code will be available at https://github.com/linjiaping1/Re-Prefill.
Jiaping Lin, Fei Shen, Junzhe Li +4
May 10, 2026cs.CL

Mem-W: Latent Memory-Native GUI Agents

GUI agents are beginning to operate the web, mobile, and desktop as interactive worlds, where successful control depends on carrying forward visual, procedural, and task-level evidence beyond the fleeting present screen. Yet most agents still treat memory as an external, human-readable artifact: histories are summarized, categorized, retrieved, and reinserted as text or structured records before being encoded again by the policy. This creates a mismatch between the representational form in which experience is stored and the latent embedding sequence over which modern GUI policies actually act. We introduce Mem-W, a series of latent-memory-native GUI agents that treat memory as part of the agent's continuous context rather than as an auxiliary symbolic scaffold. Mem-W weaves both historical trajectories (as experiential memory) and in-session segments (as working memory) into compact memory tokens through a shared trajectory-to-latent compressor. These tokens are woven with the current GUI observation and local context into one continuous embedding sequence, allowing the agent to read successes, failures, and unfinished progress through the same machine-native interface. Mem-W is trained with self-distillation and outcome-aware supervision to preserve decision-relevant state while filtering memory toward evidence that truly supports task success. Across four web and mobile navigation benchmarks, Mem-W consistently improves diverse backbones and memory-enhanced baselines, with gains of up to +30.0+30.0, suggesting that latent-context-native memory can serve as a scalable foundation for long-horizon GUI agency.
Guibin Zhang, Yaohui Ling, Fanci Meng +2
May 8, 2026cs.AI

LiteGUI: Distilling Compact GUI Agents with Reinforcement Learning

Developing lightweight, on-device vision-language GUI agents is essential for efficient cross-platform automated interaction. However, current on-device agents are constrained by limited model capacity, and further performance improvements remain urgently needed. Traditional Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for small-scale models often leads to overfitting, catastrophic forgetting and policy rigidity, and thus fails to fully address these challenges. In this work, we propose a novel SFT-free training paradigm that significantly enhances the performance of small-scale models. We first present the initial systematic integration of generalized knowledge distillation into the GUI agent domain via Guided On-policy Distillation. By incorporating oracle reference trajectories together with a dynamic retrieval mechanism, our method reduces hallucinations and mitigates the cognitive misalignment inherent in multi-solution GUI tasks. Building on this foundation, we further introduce a Multi-solution Dual-level GRPO framework that jointly aligns macro-level subtask planning with micro-level execution matching, thereby improving exploration in long-horizon GUI agent scenarios. In addition, we construct an automated data generation pipeline to synthesize GUI task trajectories with rich multi-solution annotations. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance among lightweight models while remaining competitive with substantially larger-scale models across all benchmarks. Ablation studies further demonstrate that structured on-policy distillation and multi-solution dual-level exploration can fully unlock the capabilities of 2B/3B scale agents, surpassing the performance limits of conventional imitation learning.
Yubin Wu, Zicheng Cai, Liping Ning +4
May 7, 2026cs.SE

Computer Use at the Edge of the Statistical Precipice

Evaluating Computer Use Agents (CUAs) on interactive environments is fraught with methodological pitfalls that the field has yet to systematically address. We show that a 1MB replay script that blindly executes a recorded action sequence without ever observing the screen outperforms frontier models on prominent static benchmarks, and prove that its expected success rate is exactly equal to the source agent's pass@k in deterministic environments. We trace this and other failures to two root causes: non-principled environment design (static, unsandboxed, or unreliably verified environments) and non-principled evaluation methodology (naive aggregation and misuse of pass@k for stateful UI interactions). To address the first, we propose PRISM, five design principles for CUA environments (privileged verification, realistic environments, integrity-checked configurations, sandboxed execution, and multifactorial variability) and instantiate them in DigiWorld, a benchmark of 15 realistic sandboxed mobile applications able to evaluate agents in over 3.2 million verified unique configurations. To address the second, we develop an aggregation framework pairing Wilson score intervals with hierarchical bootstrap, producing confidence intervals that correctly account for the nested structure of CUA benchmarks, as we empirically demonstrate. All together, we show that principled environment design and rigorous evaluation methodology are not optional refinements but prerequisites for meaningful CUA research.
Pierluca D'Oro, Sneha Silwal, William Wong +6
May 7, 2026cs.CV

BAMI: Training-Free Bias Mitigation in GUI Grounding

GUI grounding is a critical capability for enabling GUI agents to execute tasks such as clicking and dragging. However, in complex scenarios like the ScreenSpot-Pro benchmark, existing models often suffer from suboptimal performance. Utilizing the proposed \textbf{Masked Prediction Distribution (MPD)} attribution method, we identify that the primary sources of errors are twofold: high image resolution (leading to precision bias) and intricate interface elements (resulting in ambiguity bias). To address these challenges, we introduce \textbf{Bias-Aware Manipulation Inference (BAMI)}, which incorporates two key manipulations, coarse-to-fine focus and candidate selection, to effectively mitigate these biases. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that BAMI significantly enhances the accuracy of various GUI grounding models in a training-free setting. For instance, applying our method to the TianXi-Action-7B model boosts its accuracy on the ScreenSpot-Pro benchmark from 51.9% to 57.8%. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm the robustness of the BAMI approach across diverse parameter configurations, highlighting its stability and effectiveness. Code is available at https://github.com/Neur-IO/BAMI.
Borui Zhang, Bo Zhang, Bo Wang +6
May 4, 2026cs.CV

AutoFocus: Uncertainty-Aware Active Visual Search for GUI Grounding

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled autonomous GUI agents that translate natural language instructions into executable screen coordinates. However, grounding performance degrades in high-resolution interfaces, where dense layouts and small interactive elements expose a resolution gap between modern displays and model input constraints. Existing zoom-in strategies rely on fixed anchors, heuristic grids, or reinforcement learning, lacking a principled mechanism to adaptively determine where refinement is needed and how much spatial uncertainty should be explored. We propose AutoFocus, a training-free, uncertainty-aware active visual search framework for GUI grounding. Our key insight is that token-level perplexity in coordinate generation naturally reflects spatial uncertainty. Rather than committing to a single prediction, AutoFocus samples multiple coordinate hypotheses and converts their axial perplexities into an anisotropic gaussian spatial probability field, explicitly modeling directional uncertainty. Based on this field, we generate global and local region proposals and introduce Shape-Aware Zooming to balance tight localization with contextual preservation. A visual prompt-based aggregation step then selects the most consistent prediction via structured comparison. Extensive experiments on ScreenSpot-Pro and ScreenSpot-V2 demonstrate consistent improvements across both general-purpose and GUI-specialized VLMs.
Ruilin Yao, Shegnwu Xiong, Tianyu Zou +2