Graphical User Interface Agents

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.

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 .

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 $19.6\%$ on AndroidWorld, while reducing token costs $6\times$ relative to GPT-4o. With a $2.8$s average latency, EAM enables reliable, quick, and long-horizon GUI automation.

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.

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 $+30.0$, suggesting that latent-context-native memory can serve as a scalable foundation for long-horizon GUI agency.

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.

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.

Vision-language model based graphical user interface (GUI) agents have shown strong interaction capabilities. However, they often behave unfaithfully, relying on memorized shortcuts rather than grounding actions in displayed screen evidence or user instructions. To address this, we propose Faithful-Agent, a faithfulness-first framework that reformulates GUI interaction to prioritize evidence groundedness and internal consistency. Faithful-Agent employs a two-stage pipeline: (i) a faithfulness-oriented SFT stage to instill abstainment behaviors under evidence perturbations; (ii) an RFT stage that further amplifies faithfulness by introducing the guided advantage estimator (GuAE), an anchor-based and variance-adaptive advantage tempering mechanism built upon GRPO. GuAE prevents advantage collapse in low-variance rollout groups under sparse GUI rewards, and with a thought-action consistency reward, Faithful-Agent (Stage II) elevates the Trap SR from 13.88% to 80.21% relative to the baseline, while preserving robust general instruction-following performance.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding maps natural language instructions to the visual coordinates of target elements and serves as a core capability for autonomous GUI agents. Recent reinforcement learning methods (e.g., GRPO) have achieved strong performance, but they rely on expensive multiple rollouts and suffer from sparse signals on hard samples. These limitations make on-policy self-distillation (OPSD), which provides dense token-level supervision from a single rollout, a promising alternative. However, its applicability to GUI grounding remains unexplored. In this paper, we present GUI-SD, the first OPSD framework tailored for GUI grounding. First, it constructs a visually enriched privileged context for the teacher using a target bounding box and a Gaussian soft mask, providing informative guidance without leaking exact coordinates. Second, it employs entropy-guided distillation, which adaptively weights tokens based on digit significance and teacher confidence, concentrating optimization on the most impactful and reliable positions. Extensive experiments on six representative GUI grounding benchmarks show that GUI-SD consistently outperforms GRPO-based methods and naive OPSD in both accuracy and training efficiency. Code and training data are available at https://zhangyan-ucas.github.io/GUI-SD/.

AI agents that interact with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) require effective observation representations for reliable grounding. The accessibility tree is a commonly used text-based format that encodes UI element attributes, but it suffers from redundancy and lacks structural information such as spatial relationships among elements. We propose A11y-Compressor, a framework that transforms linearized accessibility trees into compact and structured representations. Our implementation, Compressed-a11y, applies a lightweight and structured transformation pipeline with modal detection, redundancy reduction, and semantic structuring. Experiments on the OSWorld benchmark show that Compressed-a11y reduces input tokens to 22% of the original while improving task success rates by 5.1 percentage points on average.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents have emerged as a promising paradigm for intelligent systems that perceive and interact with graphical interfaces visually. Yet supervised fine-tuning alone cannot handle long-horizon credit assignment, distribution shifts, and safe exploration in irreversible environments, making Reinforcement Learning (RL) a central methodology for advancing automation. In this work, we present the first comprehensive overview of the intersection between RL and GUI agents, and examine how this research direction may evolve toward digital inhabitants. We propose a principled taxonomy that organizes existing methods into Offline RL, Online RL, and Hybrid Strategies, and complement it with analyses of reward engineering, data efficiency, and key technical innovations. Our analysis reveals several emerging trends: the tension between reliability and scalability is motivating the adoption of composite, multi-tier reward architectures; GUI I/O latency bottlenecks are accelerating the shift toward world-model-based training, which can yield substantial performance gains; and the spontaneous emergence of System-2-style deliberation suggests that explicit reasoning supervision may not be necessary when sufficiently rich reward signals are available. We distill these findings into a roadmap covering process rewards, continual RL, cognitive architectures, and safe deployment, aiming to guide the next generation of robust GUI automation and its agent-native infrastructure.

While GUI agents have shown impressive capabilities in common computer-use tasks such as OSWorld, current benchmarks mainly focus on isolated and single-application tasks. This overlooks a critical real-world requirement of coordinating across multiple applications to accomplish complex profession-specific workflows. To bridge this gap, we present a computer-use benchmark in cross-application workflows, named WindowsWorld, designed to systematically assess GUI Agents on complex multi-step tasks that mirror real-world professional activities. Our methodology uses a multi-agent framework steered by 16 occupations to generate four difficulty-level tasks with intermediate inspection, which are then refined by human review and executed in a simulated environment. The resulting benchmark contains 181 tasks with an average of 5.0 sub-goals across 17 common desktop applications, of which 78% are inherently multi-application. Experimental results of leading large models and agents show that: 1) All computer-use agents perform poorly on multi-application tasks (< 21% success rate), far below the performance of simple single-app tasks; 2) They largely fail at tasks requiring conditional judgment and reasoning across $\geq$ 3 applications, stalling at early sub-goals; 3) Low execution efficiency, where tasks often fail despite far exceeding human step limits. Code, benchmark data, and evaluation resources are available at github.com/HITsz-TMG/WindowsWorld.

Recent advancements in Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents have predominantly focused on training paradigms like supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). However, the challenge of high-dynamic GUI environments remains largely underexplored. Existing agents typically rely on a single screenshot after each action for decision-making, leading to a partially observable (or even unobservable) Markov decision process, where the key GUI state including important information for actions is often inadequately captured. To systematically explore this challenge, we introduce DynamicGUIBench, a comprehensive online GUI benchmark spanning ten applications and diverse interaction scenarios characterized by important interface changes between actions. Furthermore, we present DynamicUI, an agent designed for dynamic interfaces, which takes screen-recording videos of the interaction process as input and consists of three components: a dynamic perceiver, a refinement strategy, and a reflection. Specifically, the dynamic perceiver clusters frames of the GUI video, generates captions for the centroids, and iteratively selects the most informative frames as the salient dynamic context. Considering that there may be inconsistencies and noise between the selected frames and the textual context of the agent, the refinement strategy employs an action-conditioned filtering to refine thoughts to mitigate thought-action inconsistency and redundancy. Based on the refined agent trajectories, the reflection module provides effective and accurate guidance for further actions. Experiments on DynamicGUIBench demonstrate that DynamicUI significantly improves the performance in dynamic GUI environments, while maintaining competitive performance on other public benchmarks.

Autonomous GUI agents face two fundamental challenges: early stopping, where agents prematurely declare success without verifiable evidence, and repetitive loops, where agents cycle through the same failing actions without recovery. We present VLAA-GUI, a modular GUI agentic framework built around three integrated components that guide the system on when to Stop, Recover, and Search. First, a mandatory Completeness Verifier enforces UI-observable success criteria and verification at every finish step -- with an agent-level verifier that cross-examines completion claims with decision rules, rejecting those lacking direct visual evidence. Second, a mandatory Loop Breaker provides multi-tier filtering: switching interaction mode after repeated failures, forcing strategy changes after persistent screen-state recurrence, and binding reflection signals to strategy shifts. Third, an on-demand Search Agent searches online for unfamiliar workflows by directly querying a capable LLM with search ability, returning results as plain text. We additionally integrate a Coding Agent for code-intensive actions and a Grounding Agent for precise action grounding, both invoked on demand when required. We evaluate VLAA-GUI across five top-tier backbones, including Opus 4.5, 4.6 and Gemini 3.1 Pro, on two benchmarks with Linux and Windows tasks, achieving top performance on both (77.5% on OSWorld and 61.0% on WindowsAgentArena). Notably, three of the five backbones surpass human performance (72.4%) on OSWorld in a single pass. Ablation studies show that all three proposed components consistently improve a strong backbone, while a weaker backbone benefits more from these tools when the step budget is sufficient. Further analysis also shows that the Loop Breaker nearly halves wasted steps for loop-prone models.

Mobile GUI agents can automate smartphone tasks by interacting directly with app interfaces, but how they should communicate with users during execution remains underexplored. Existing systems rely on two extremes: foreground execution, which maximizes transparency but prevents multitasking, and background execution, which supports multitasking but provides little visual awareness. Through iterative formative studies, we found that users prefer a hybrid model with just-in-time visual interaction, but the most effective visualization modality depends on the task. Motivated by this, we present AgentLens, a mobile GUI agent that adaptively uses three visual modalities during human-agent interaction: Full UI, Partial UI, and GenUI. AgentLens extends a standard mobile agent with adaptive communication actions and uses Virtual Display to enable background execution with selective visual overlays. In a controlled study with 21 participants, AgentLens was preferred by 85.7% of participants and achieved the highest usability (1.94 Overall PSSUQ) and adoption-intent (6.43/7).

GUI agents that control desktop computers via screenshot-and-click loops introduce a new class of vulnerability: the observation-to-action gap (mean 6.51 s on real OSWorld workloads) creates a Time-Of-Check, Time-Of-Use (TOCTOU) window during which an unprivileged attacker can manipulate the UI state. We formalize this as a Visual Atomicity Violation and characterize three concrete attack primitives: (A) Notification Overlay Hijack, (B) Window Focus Manipulation, and (C) Web DOM Injection. Primitive B, the closest desktop analog to Android Action Rebinding, achieves 100% action-redirection success rate with zero visual evidence at the observation time. We propose Pre-execution UI State Verification (PUSV), a lightweight three-layer defense that re-verifies the UI state immediately before each action dispatch: masked pixel SSIM at the click target (L1), global screenshot diff (L2a), and X Window snapshot diff (L2b). PUSV achieves 100% Action Interception Rate across 180 adversarial trials (135 Primitive A + 45 Primitive B) with zero false positives and < 0.1 s overhead. Against Primitive C (zero-visual-footprint DOM injection), PUSV reveals a structural blind spot (~0% AIR), motivating future OS+DOM defense-in-depth architectures. No single PUSV layer alone achieves full coverage; different primitives require different detection signals, validating the layered design.

While progress in GUI agents has been largely driven by industrial-scale training, ungrounded hallucinations often trigger cascading failures in real-world deployments.Unlike general VLM domains, the GUI agent field lacks a hallucination-focused suite for fine-grained diagnosis, reliable evaluation, and targeted mitigation.To bridge this gap, we introduce HalluClear, a comprehensive suite for hallucination mitigation in GUI agents as a complement to computation-intensive scaling. HalluClear comprises: (1) a GUI-specific hallucination taxonomy derived from empirical failure analysis; (2) a calibrated three-stage evaluation workflow which enhances VLM-as-a-judge reliability via expert-annotated benchmarking and ensemble credibility estimation; and (3) a mitigation scheme based on closed-loop structured reasoning, enabling lightweight continual post-training with cold-start initialization for both generalist and GUI-specialist agents. Experiments across representative agents and public benchmarks demonstrate that post-training on only 9K samples within our suite can significantly reduce hallucinations, thereby improving grounding and action fidelity, offering a compute-efficient pathway to robust GUI automation.

Training GUI agents with traditional centralized methods faces significant cost and scalability challenges. Federated learning (FL) offers a promising solution, yet its potential is hindered by the lack of benchmarks that capture real-world, cross-platform heterogeneity. To bridge this gap, we introduce FedGUI, the first comprehensive benchmark for developing and evaluating federated GUI agents across mobile, web, and desktop platforms. FedGUI provides a suite of six curated datasets to systematically study four crucial types of heterogeneity: cross-platform, cross-device, cross-OS, and cross-source. Extensive experiments reveal several key insights: First, we show that cross-platform collaboration improves performance, extending prior mobile-only federated learning to diverse GUI environments; Second, we demonstrate the presence of distinct heterogeneity dimensions and identify platform and OS as the most influential factors. FedGUI provides a vital foundation for the community to build more scalable and privacy-preserving GUI agents for real-world deployment. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/wwh0411/FedGUI..

Large vision-language models have endowed GUI agents with strong general capabilities for interface understanding and interaction. However, due to insufficient exposure to domain-specific software operation data during training, these agents exhibit significant domain bias - they lack familiarity with the specific operation workflows (planning) and UI element layouts (grounding) of particular applications, limiting their real-world task performance. In this paper, we present GUIDE (GUI Unbiasing via Instructional-Video Driven Expertise), a training-free, plug-and-play framework that resolves GUI agent domain bias by autonomously acquiring domain-specific expertise from web tutorial videos through a retrieval-augmented automated annotation pipeline. GUIDE introduces two key innovations. First, a subtitle-driven Video-RAG pipeline unlocks video semantics through subtitle analysis, performing progressive three-stage retrieval - domain classification, topic extraction, and relevance matching - to identify task-relevant tutorial videos. Second, a fully automated annotation pipeline built on an inverse dynamics paradigm feeds consecutive keyframes enhanced with UI element detection into VLMs, inferring the required planning and grounding knowledge that are injected into the agent's corresponding modules to address both manifestations of domain bias. Extensive experiments on OSWorld demonstrate GUIDE's generality as a plug-and-play component for both multi-agent systems and single-model agents. It consistently yields over 5% improvements and reduces execution steps - without modifying any model parameters or architecture - validating GUIDE as an architecture-agnostic enhancement to bridge GUI agent domain bias.

GUI agents are rapidly shifting from multi-module pipelines to end-to-end, native vision-language models (VLMs) that perceive raw screenshots and directly interact with digital devices. Despite rapid progress on general GUI tasks, CAPTCHA solving remains a major challenge. On the other hand, although specialized CAPTCHA solving pipelines exist, they cannot handle general GUI tasks. To address this gap, we introduce ReCAP: a CAPTCHA-capable native GUI agent that solves modern, interactive CAPTCHA challenges while retaining general GUI-agent performance. We first develop a dynamic CAPTCHA system spanning seven representative CAPTCHA types, designed to stress primitive and complementary capabilities for CAPTCHA solving. Then, we develop an automated data collection and curation pipeline that generates large-scale CAPTCHA interaction trajectories paired with reasoning traces. As CAPTCHA solving often requires multi-step interaction and recovery from intermediate mistakes, we further leverage failed trajectories to construct self-correction data, training agents to reflect on errors and correct their actions online. Across synthetic and real-world test sets, ReCAP substantially improves CAPTCHA-solving success over its base agents, while maintaining strong performance on general GUI-agent benchmarks.

Modern vision-language-model (VLM) based graphical user interface (GUI) agents are expected not only to execute actions accurately but also to respond to user instructions with low latency. While existing research on GUI-agent security mainly focuses on manipulating action correctness, the security risks related to response efficiency remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce SlowBA, a novel backdoor attack that targets the responsiveness of VLM-based GUI agents. The key idea is to manipulate response latency by inducing excessively long reasoning chains under specific trigger patterns. To achieve this, we propose a two-stage reward-level backdoor injection (RBI) strategy that first aligns the long-response format and then learns trigger-aware activation through reinforcement learning. In addition, we design realistic pop-up windows as triggers that naturally appear in GUI environments, improving the stealthiness of the attack. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and baselines demonstrate that SlowBA can significantly increase response length and latency while largely preserving task accuracy. The attack remains effective even with a small poisoning ratio and under several defense settings. These findings reveal a previously overlooked security vulnerability in GUI agents and highlight the need for defenses that consider both action correctness and response efficiency. Code can be found in https://github.com/tu-tuing/SlowBA.

Reliable models should not only predict correctly, but also justify decisions with acceptable evidence. Yet conventional supervised learning typically provides only class-level labels, allowing models to achieve high accuracy through shortcut correlations rather than the intended evidence. Human priors can help constrain such behavior, but aligning models to these priors remains challenging because learned representations often diverge from human perception. To address this challenge, we propose an attribution-based human prior alignment method. We encode human priors as input regions that the model is expected to rely on (e.g., bounding boxes), and leverage a highly faithful subset-selection-based attribution approach to expose the model's decision evidence during training. When the attribution region deviates substantially from the prior regions, we penalize reliance on off-prior evidence, encouraging the model to shift its attribution toward the intended regions. This is achieved through a training objective that imposes attribution constraints induced by the human prior. We validate our method on both image classification and click decision tasks in MLLM-based GUI agent models. Across conventional classification and autoregressive generation settings, human prior alignment consistently improves task accuracy while also enhancing the model's decision reasonability.

Large multimodal model powered GUI agents are emerging as high-privilege operators on mobile platforms, entrusted to perceive screen content and inject inputs across application boundaries. While these agents aim to automate complex tasks, we demonstrate that their design introduces a fundamental conflict with Android's strict application sandboxing. We present a novel cross-application Action Rebinding attack, which allows a malicious application with zero dangerous permissions to hijack the agent's execution and perform privileged operations on behalf of the attacker. Our attack exploits the inevitable observation-action gap inherent in the agent's reasoning pipeline. A malicious app can render a benign ``contextual carrier'' to elicit a planned action, and then swap the foreground to a sensitive target application during the reasoning latency. The agent, unaware of the transition, unwittingly executes the action in the privileged context. We further advance this attack by weaponizing the agent's own task-recovery logic to create programmable, multi-step exploit loops , and introducing an Intent Alignment Strategy (IAS) that manipulates the agent's reasoning to rationalize the hijacked state. We evaluate our attack on six widely-used Android GUI agents. Our results demonstrate a 100% success rate for atomic action hijacking and the ability to orchestrate high-impact exploits, including unauthorized file deletion, SMS transmission, and app uninstallation, without the attacker holding any corresponding permissions. Furthermore, since the malicious application separates intent from capability and contains no privileged API calls, it achieves a 0% detection rate across commercial malware scanners (e.g., VirusTotal), highlighting a critical blind spot in current mobile security analysis. To access experimental logs and demonstration videos, please contact yi_qian@smail.nju.edu.cn.

GUI agents that interact with graphical interfaces on behalf of users represent a promising direction for practical AI assistants. However, training such agents is hindered by the scarcity of suitable environments. We present InfiniteWeb, a system that automatically generates functional web environments at scale for GUI agent training. While LLMs perform well on generating a single webpage, building a realistic and functional website with many interconnected pages faces challenges. We address these challenges through unified specification, task-centric test-driven development, and a combination of website seed with reference design image to ensure diversity. Our system also generates verifiable task evaluators enabling dense reward signals for reinforcement learning. Experiments show that InfiniteWeb surpasses commercial coding agents at realistic website construction, and GUI agents trained on our generated environments achieve significant performance improvements on OSWorld and Online-Mind2Web, demonstrating the effectiveness of proposed system.

Mobile GUI agents have shown strong potential in real-world automation and practical applications. However, most existing agents remain reactive, making decisions mainly from current screen, which limits their performance on long-horizon tasks. Building a world model from repeated interactions enables forecasting action outcomes and supports better decision making for mobile GUI agents. This is challenging because the model must predict post-action states with spatial awareness while remaining efficient enough for practical deployment. In this paper, we propose MobileDreamer, an efficient world-model-based lookahead framework to equip the GUI agents based on the future imagination provided by the world model. It consists of textual sketch world model and rollout imagination for GUI agent. Textual sketch world model forecasts post-action states through a learning process to transform digital images into key task-related sketches, and designs a novel order-invariant learning strategy to preserve the spatial information of GUI elements. The rollout imagination strategy for GUI agent optimizes the action-selection process by leveraging the prediction capability of world model. Experiments on Android World show that MobileDreamer achieves state-of-the-art performance and improves task success by 5.25%. World model evaluations further verify that our textual sketch modeling accurately forecasts key GUI elements.