# Tell Me What's Next: Textual Foresight for Generic UI Representations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.07822 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07822/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01206/) (2022)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4555/) (2014)
- [VirTex: Learning Visual Representations from Textual Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06666/) (2020)
- [WIT: Wikipedia-based Image Text Dataset for Multimodal Multilingual Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01913/) (2021)
- [Deep Visual Foresight for Planning Robot Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.00696/) (2016)
- [Visual Reinforcement Learning with Imagined Goals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04742/) (2018)
- [Stochastic Variational Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11252/) (2017)
- [Stochastic Adversarial Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01523/) (2018)
- [Screen2Words: Automatic Mobile UI Summarization with Multimodal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03353/) (2021)
- [Pathdreamer: A World Model for Indoor Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08756/) (2021)
- [Widget Captioning: Generating Natural Language Description for Mobile User Interface Elements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04295/) (2020)
- [UIBert: Learning Generic Multimodal Representations for UI Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13731/) (2021)
- [Learning Compact Metrics for MT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06341/) (2021)
- [Look Before You Leap: Bridging Model-Free and Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Planned-Ahead Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07729/) (2018)
- [Hierarchical Foresight: Self-Supervised Learning of Long-Horizon Tasks via Visual Subgoal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05829/) (2019)
- [Spotlight: Mobile UI Understanding using Vision-Language Models with a Focus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14927/) (2022)
- [A Dataset for Interactive Vision-Language Navigation with Unknown Command Feasibility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02312/) (2022)
- [Goal-Aware Prediction: Learning to Model What Matters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07170/) (2020)
- [ActionBert: Leveraging User Actions for Semantic Understanding of User Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12350/) (2020)
- [Screen2Vec: Semantic Embedding of GUI Screens and GUI Components](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11103/) (2021)
- [VisuoSpatial Foresight for Multi-Step, Multi-Task Fabric Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09044/) (2020)
- [TL;DW? Summarizing Instructional Videos with Task Relevance & Cross-Modal Saliency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06773/) (2022)
- [Experience-Embedded Visual Foresight](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05071/) (2019)
- [Modeling Mobile Interface Tappability Using Crowdsourcing and Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.11247/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [A Survey of WebAgents: Towards Next-Generation AI Agents for Web Automation with Large Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23350/) (2025)
- [OS Agents: A Survey on MLLM-based Agents for General Computing Devices Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04482/) (2025)
- [LLM-Powered GUI Agents in Phone Automation: Surveying Progress and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19838/) (2025)
- [GUI-Reflection: Empowering Multimodal GUI Models with Self-Reflection Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08012/) (2025)
- [Scaling GUI Agents with Visual State Transitions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24112/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Mobile app user interfaces (UIs) are rich with action, text, structure, and image content that can be utilized to learn generic UI representations for tasks like automating user commands, summarizing content, and evaluating the accessibility of user interfaces. Prior work has learned strong visual representations with local or global captioning losses, but fails to retain both granularities. To combat this, we propose Textual Foresight, a novel pretraining objective for learning UI screen representations. Textual Foresight generates global text descriptions of future UI states given a current UI and local action taken. Our approach requires joint reasoning over elements and entire screens, resulting in improved UI features: on generation tasks, UI agents trained with Textual Foresight outperform state-of-the-art by 2% with 28x fewer images. We train with our newly constructed mobile app dataset, OpenApp, which results in the first public dataset for app UI representation learning. OpenApp enables new baselines, and we find Textual Foresight improves average task performance over them by 5.7% while having access to 2x less data.