mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Visual Test-time Scaling for GUI Agent Grounding

arXiv 2505.00684 ↗First posted 1 May 2025cs.CV cs.AI cs.LGcited by 30

On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning

also in 2 more
Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce RegionFocus, a visual test-time scaling approach for Vision Language Model Agents. Understanding webpages is challenging due to the visual complexity of GUI images and the large number of interface elements, making accurate action selection difficult. Our approach dynamically zooms in on relevant regions, reducing background clutter and improving grounding accuracy. To support this process, we propose an image-as-map mechanism that visualizes key landmarks at each step, providing a transparent action record and enables the agent to effectively choose among action candidates. Even with a simple region selection strategy, we observe significant performance gains of 28+% on Screenspot-pro and 24+% on WebVoyager benchmarks on top of two state-of-the-art open vision language model agents, UI-TARS and Qwen2.5-VL, highlighting the effectiveness of visual test-time scaling in interactive settings. We achieve a new state-of-the-art grounding performance of 61.6% on the ScreenSpot-Pro benchmark by applying RegionFocus to a Qwen2.5-VL-72B model. Our code will be released publicly at https://github.com/tiangeluo/RegionFocus.

Key facts. Cited by 30 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 21 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 May 2025.

Builds on

21 of 47 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025OmniParser V2: Structured-Points-of-Thought for Unified Visual Text Parsing and Its Generality to Multimodal Large Language Models22 Feb

Other references · 20

  1. 2023Segment Anythingcited by 8,234
  2. 2022Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Modelscited by 5,708
  3. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,587
  4. 2021WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedbackcited by 1,745
  5. 2025UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agentscited by 610
  6. 2024SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agentscited by 567
  7. 2024GPT-4V(ision) is a Generalist Web Agent, if Groundedcited by 563
  8. 2024WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Modelscited by 438
  9. 2024Navigating the Digital World as Humans Do: Universal Visual Grounding for GUI Agentscited by 382
  10. 2024Mobile-Agent: Autonomous Multi-Modal Mobile Device Agent with Visual Perceptioncited by 293
  11. 2025ScreenSpot-Pro: GUI Grounding for Professional High-Resolution Computer Usecited by 254
  12. 2024PIVOT: Iterative Visual Prompting Elicits Actionable Knowledge for VLMscited by 190
8 more
  1. 2023You Only Look at Screens: Multimodal Chain-of-Action Agentscited by 185
  2. 2023GPT-4V in Wonderland: Large Multimodal Models for Zero-Shot Smartphone GUI Navigationcited by 137
  3. 2024VisualAgentBench: Towards Large Multimodal Models as Visual Foundation Agentscited by 103
  4. 2024ExACT: Teaching AI Agents to Explore with Reflective-MCTS and Exploratory Learningcited by 62
  5. 2025All Roads Lead to Likelihood: The Value of Reinforcement Learning in Fine-Tuningcited by 59
  6. 2024VisualWebArena: Evaluating Multimodal Agents on Realistic Visual Web Taskscited by 47
  7. 2025Vision-Language Model for Object Detection and Segmentation: A Review and Evaluationcited by 10
  8. 2018Learning what and where to attendcited by 8

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 9; 2026: 21.

30 papers.

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By area:

  1. 2025DiMo-GUI: Advancing Test-time Scaling in GUI Grounding via Modality-Aware Visual Reasoningcited by 31
  2. 2025Phi-Ground Tech Report: Advancing Perception in GUI Groundingcited by 25
  3. 2025Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for GUI Grounding via Region Consistencycited by 21
  4. 2025SEEA-R1: Tree-Structured Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Self-Evolving Embodied Agentscited by 15
  5. 2026Hybrid Self-evolving Structured Memory for GUI Agentscited by 13
  6. 2025MVP: Multiple View Prediction Improves GUI Groundingcited by 12
  7. 2025Zoom in, Click out: Unlocking and Evaluating the Potential of Zooming for GUI Groundingcited by 8
  8. 2026UI-Zoomer: Uncertainty-Driven Adaptive Zoom-In for GUI Groundingcited by 8
  9. 2026AtlasVA: Self-Evolving Visual Skill Memory for Teacher-Free VLM Agentscited by 7
  10. 2026Zoom to Essence: Trainless GUI Grounding by Inferring upon Interface Elementscited by 5
  11. 2026Measure Twice, Click Once: Co-evolving Proposer and Visual Critic via Reinforcement Learning for GUI Groundingcited by 5
  12. 2025Generalist Scanner Meets Specialist Locator: A Synergistic Coarse-to-Fine Framework for Robust GUI Groundingcited by 4
18 more
  1. 2026Zoom Consistency: A Free Confidence Signal in Multi-Step Visual Grounding Pipelinescited by 4
  2. 2026What Happens Before Decoding? Prefill Determines GUI Grounding in VLMscited by 4
  3. 2025MEGA-GUI: Multi-stage Enhanced Grounding Agents for GUI Elementscited by 3
  4. 2026GUI Agents with Reinforcement Learning: Toward Digital Inhabitantscited by 3
  5. 2026AutoFocus: Uncertainty-Aware Active Visual Search for GUI Groundingcited by 3
  6. 2025WebRouter: Query-specific Router via Variational Information Bottleneck for Cost-sensitive Web Agentcited by 2
  7. 2026One Forward Beats Two: InnerZoom for Accurate and Efficient GUI Groundingcited by 2
  8. 2026Test-Time Self-Evolving GUI Visual Grounding via Reflection-Guided On-Policy Self-Distillationcited by 2
  9. 2026WebChallenger: A Reliable and Efficient Generalist Web Agentcited by 1
  10. 2026Thinking with Patterns: Breaking the Perceptual Bottleneck in Visual Planning via Pattern Inductioncited by 0
  11. 2026LookAgain: Closed-Loop GUI Grounding with Visually Grounded Reflectioncited by 0
  12. 2026GUI-Primitives: Diagnosing Spatial Reasoning Failures in Vision-Language GUI Groundingcited by 0
  13. 2026InSight: A Benchmark for Agentic Claim Verification in Interactive Visualizationscited by 0
  14. 2026Efficient GUI Agents: A Systems Survey of Observation, Memory, Action, and Runtime Optimizationcited by 0
  15. 2026ScreenHaystack: Finding Blind Zones in GUI Groundingcited by 0
  16. 2026Recurrent Latent Visual Search for GUI Groundingcited by 0
  17. 2026ConClick: Element-Wise Contrastive Learning Improves GUI Groundingcited by 0
  18. 2026MHVF: Training-Free GUI Grounding via Verification-Guided Multi-Hypothesis Searchcited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025R-VLM: Region-Aware Vision Language Model for Precise GUI Grounding
  2. 2025GUI-Actor: Coordinate-Free Visual Grounding for GUI Agents
  3. 2025GTA1: GUI Test-time Scaling Agent
  4. 2025GUI-ARP: Enhancing Grounding with Adaptive Region Perception for GUI Agents
  5. 2026GoClick: Lightweight Element Grounding Model for Autonomous GUI Interaction
  6. 2026AdaZoom-GUI: Adaptive Zoom-based GUI Grounding with Instruction Refinement
  7. 2026Seg2Click: Learning Pixel-Level Action Masks for GUI Visual Grounding
  8. 2024Aria-UI: Visual Grounding for GUI Instructions