# OmniParser for Pure Vision Based GUI Agent

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.00203 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00203/

## Key facts

- Cited by 198 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and 3D vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 14 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06070/) (2023)
- [CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08914/) (2023)
- [SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10935/) (2024)
- [Reinforcement Learning on Web Interfaces Using Workflow-Guided Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08802/) (2018)
- [Mapping Natural Language Instructions to Mobile UI Action Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03776/) (2020)
- [Multimodal Web Navigation with Instruction-Finetuned Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11854/) (2023)
- [GPT-4V in Wonderland: Large Multimodal Models for Zero-Shot Smartphone GUI Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07562/) (2023)
- [Screen2Words: Automatic Mobile UI Summarization with Multimodal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03353/) (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)
- [From Pixels to UI Actions: Learning to Follow Instructions via Graphical User Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00245/) (2023)
- [ActionBert: Leveraging User Actions for Semantic Understanding of User Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12350/) (2020)
- [Towards Better Semantic Understanding of Mobile Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02663/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 198)

- [UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12326/) (2025)
- [Navigating the Digital World as Humans Do: Universal Visual Grounding for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05243/) (2024)
- [OS-ATLAS: A Foundation Action Model for Generalist GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23218/) (2024)
- [Aguvis: Unified Pure Vision Agents for Autonomous GUI Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04454/) (2024)
- [ShowUI: One Vision-Language-Action Model for GUI Visual Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17465/) (2024)
- [Windows Agent Arena: Evaluating Multi-Modal OS Agents at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08264/) (2024)
- [UI-R1: Enhancing Efficient Action Prediction of GUI Agents by Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21620/) (2025)
- [Large Language Model-Brained GUI Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18279/) (2024)
- [Agent S2: A Compositional Generalist-Specialist Framework for Computer Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00906/) (2025)
- [Magma: A Foundation Model for Multimodal AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13130/) (2025)
- [Scaling Computer-Use Grounding via User Interface Decomposition and Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13227/) (2025)
- [AgentTrek: Agent Trajectory Synthesis via Guiding Replay with Web Tutorials](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09605/) (2024)
- [Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01990/) (2025)
- [Agentic Large Language Models, a survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23037/) (2025)
- [GTA1: GUI Test-time Scaling Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05791/) (2025)
- [GUI Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13501/) (2024)
- [GUI-Actor: Coordinate-Free Visual Grounding for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03143/) (2025)
- [DINO-X: A Unified Vision Model for Open-World Object Detection and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14347/) (2024)
- [A Survey of WebAgents: Towards Next-Generation AI Agents for Web Automation with Large Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23350/) (2025)
- [Lifelong Learning of Large Language Model based Agents: A Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07278/) (2025)
- [UI-Vision: A Desktop-centric GUI Benchmark for Visual Perception and Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15661/) (2025)
- [GUI-G1: Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training for Visual Grounding in GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15810/) (2025)
- [GUI-G2: Gaussian Reward Modeling for GUI Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15846/) (2025)
- [A Survey on (M)LLM-Based GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13865/) (2025)
- [ScaleCUA: Scaling Open-Source Computer Use Agents with Cross-Platform Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15221/) (2025)
- [AppAgentX: Evolving GUI Agents as Proficient Smartphone Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02268/) (2025)
- [AgentCPM-GUI: Building Mobile-Use Agents with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01391/) (2025)
- [UFO2: The Desktop AgentOS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14603/) (2025)
- [OSWorld-Human: Benchmarking the Efficiency of Computer-Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16042/) (2025)
- [CoAct-1: Computer-using Multi-Agent System with Coding Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03923/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The recent success of large vision language models shows great potential in driving the agent system operating on user interfaces. However, we argue that the power multimodal models like GPT-4V as a general agent on multiple operating systems across different applications is largely underestimated due to the lack of a robust screen parsing technique capable of: 1) reliably identifying interactable icons within the user interface, and 2) understanding the semantics of various elements in a screenshot and accurately associate the intended action with the corresponding region on the screen. To fill these gaps, we introduce textscOmniParser, a comprehensive method for parsing user interface screenshots into structured elements, which significantly enhances the ability of GPT-4V to generate actions that can be accurately grounded in the corresponding regions of the interface. We first curated an interactable icon detection dataset using popular webpages and an icon description dataset. These datasets were utilized to fine-tune specialized models: a detection model to parse interactable regions on the screen and a caption model to extract the functional semantics of the detected elements. textscOmniParser significantly improves GPT-4V's performance on ScreenSpot benchmark. And on Mind2Web and AITW benchmark, textscOmniParser with screenshot only input outperforms the GPT-4V baselines requiring additional information outside of screenshot.