# Advancing Mobile GUI Agents: A Verifier-Driven Approach to Practical Deployment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15937 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15937/

## Key facts

- Cited by 38 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in GUI and mobile agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 31 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [GUI and mobile agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/gui-and-mobile-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Let's Verify Step by Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20050/) (2023)
- [A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15594/) (2024)
- [CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08914/) (2023)
- [API-Bank: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Tool-Augmented LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08244/) (2023)
- [GPT-4V(ision) is a Generalist Web Agent, if Grounded](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01614/) (2024)
- [Generative Verifiers: Reward Modeling as Next-Token Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15240/) (2024)
- [AndroidWorld: A Dynamic Benchmarking Environment for Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14573/) (2024)
- [Navigating the Digital World as Humans Do: Universal Visual Grounding for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05243/) (2024)
- [Android in the Wild: A Large-Scale Dataset for Android Device Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10088/) (2023)
- [rStar-Math: Small LLMs Can Master Math Reasoning with Self-Evolved Deep Thinking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04519/) (2025)
- [Mobile-Agent: Autonomous Multi-Modal Mobile Device Agent with Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16158/) (2024)
- [Agent S: An Open Agentic Framework that Uses Computers Like a Human](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08164/) (2024)
- [AutoDroid: LLM-powered Task Automation in Android](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15272/) (2023)
- [Ferret-UI: Grounded Mobile UI Understanding with Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05719/) (2024)
- [Aria-UI: Visual Grounding for GUI Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16256/) (2024)
- [AndroidLab: Training and Systematic Benchmarking of Android Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24024/) (2024)
- [AutoGLM: Autonomous Foundation Agents for GUIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00820/) (2024)
- [OmniParser: A Unified Framework for Text Spotting, Key Information Extraction and Table Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19128/) (2024)
- [AppAgent v2: Advanced Agent for Flexible Mobile Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11824/) (2024)
- [DistRL: An Asynchronous Distributed Reinforcement Learning Framework for On-Device Control Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14803/) (2024)
- [MobileAgentBench: An Efficient and User-Friendly Benchmark for Mobile LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08184/) (2024)
- [Understanding the Weakness of Large Language Model Agents within a Complex Android Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06596/) (2024)
- [Explore, Select, Derive, and Recall: Augmenting LLM with Human-like Memory for Mobile Task Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03003/) (2023)
- [Octopus v2: On-device language model for super agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01744/) (2024)
- [AutoDroid-V2: Boosting SLM-based GUI Agents via Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18116/) (2024)
- [OmniParser V2: Structured-Points-of-Thought for Unified Visual Text Parsing and Its Generality to Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16161/) (2025)
- [Ponder & Press: Advancing Visual GUI Agent towards General Computer Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01268/) (2024)
- [MobileAgent: enhancing mobile control via human-machine interaction and SOP integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04124/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [MobileRL: Online Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Mobile GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18119/) (2025)
- [Web-Shepherd: Advancing PRMs for Reinforcing Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15277/) (2025)
- [UI-Venus-1.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09082/) (2026)
- [LLM-Powered GUI Agents in Phone Automation: Surveying Progress and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19838/) (2025)
- [SafeMobile: Chain-level Jailbreak Detection and Automated Evaluation for Multimodal Mobile Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00841/) (2025)
- [Agent-SAMA: State-Aware Mobile Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23596/) (2025)
- [GUI-Shift: Enhancing VLM-Based GUI Agents through Self-supervised Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12493/) (2025)
- [ProRe: A Proactive Reward System for GUI Agents via Reasoner-Actor Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21823/) (2025)
- [AgentProg: Empowering Long-Horizon GUI Agents with Program-Guided Context Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10371/) (2025)
- [UI-Voyager: A Self-Evolving GUI Agent Learning via Failed Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24533/) (2026)
- [ColorBench: Benchmarking Mobile Agents with Graph-Structured Framework for Complex Long-Horizon Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14621/) (2025)
- [MobileUse: A GUI Agent with Hierarchical Reflection for Autonomous Mobile Operation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16853/) (2025)
- [EcoAgent: An Efficient Device-Cloud Collaborative Multi-Agent Framework for Mobile Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05440/) (2025)
- [Mind the Third Eye! Benchmarking Privacy Awareness in MLLM-powered Smartphone Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19493/) (2025)
- [Beyond Pipelines: A Survey of the Paradigm Shift toward Model-Native Agentic AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16720/) (2025)
- [ColorAgent: Building A Robust, Personalized, and Interactive OS Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19386/) (2025)
- [ProSoftArena: Benchmarking Hierarchical Capabilities of Multimodal Agents in Professional Software Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02399/) (2025)
- [Darwinian Memory: A Training-Free Self-Regulating Memory System for GUI Agent Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22528/) (2026)
- [StructAgent: Harness Long-horizon Digital Agents with Unified Causal Structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11388/) (2026)
- [AndroidControl-Curated: Revealing the True Potential of GUI Agents through Benchmark Purification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18488/) (2025)
- [Mobile GUI Agents under Real-world Threats: Are We There Yet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04227/) (2025)
- [Building a Stable Planner: An Extended Finite State Machine Based Planning Module for Mobile GUI Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14141/) (2025)
- [OpenPhone: Mobile Agentic Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22009/) (2025)
- [UI-KOBE: Knowledge-Oriented Behavior Exploration for Lightweight Graph-Guided GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29534/) (2026)
- [Agent-ScanKit: Unraveling Memory and Reasoning of Multimodal Agents via Sensitivity Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00496/) (2025)
- [MobiBench: Multi-Branch, Modular Benchmark for Mobile GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12634/) (2025)
- [Adaptive and Resource-efficient Agentic AI Systems for Mobile and Embedded Devices: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00078/) (2025)
- [D-Artemis: A Deliberative Cognitive Framework for Mobile GUI Multi-Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21799/) (2025)
- [Agent+P: Guiding UI Agents via Symbolic Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06042/) (2025)
- [Curiosity Driven Knowledge Retrieval for Mobile Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19306/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose V-Droid, a mobile GUI task automation agent. Unlike previous mobile agents that utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) as generators to directly generate actions at each step, V-Droid employs LLMs as verifiers to evaluate candidate actions before making final decisions. To realize this novel paradigm, we introduce a comprehensive framework for constructing verifier-driven mobile agents: the discretized action space construction coupled with the prefilling-only workflow to accelerate the verification process, the pair-wise progress preference training to significantly enhance the verifier's decision-making capabilities, and the scalable human-agent joint annotation scheme to efficiently collect the necessary data at scale. V-Droid obtains a substantial task success rate across several public mobile task automation benchmarks: 59.5% on AndroidWorld, 38.3% on AndroidLab, and 49% on MobileAgentBench, surpassing existing agents by 5.2%, 2.1%, and 9%, respectively. Furthermore, V-Droid achieves a remarkably low latency of 4.3s per step, which is 6.1x faster compared with existing mobile agents. The source code is available at https://github.com/V-Droid-Agent/V-Droid.