mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Phi-Ground Tech Report: Advancing Perception in GUI Grounding

arXiv 2507.23779 ↗First posted 31 Jul 2025cs.CV cs.AI cs.MMcited by 24

On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

With the development of multimodal reasoning models, Computer Use Agents (CUAs), akin to Jarvis from textit"Iron Man", are becoming a reality. GUI grounding is a core component for CUAs to execute actual actions, similar to mechanical control in robotics, and it directly leads to the success or failure of the system. It determines actions such as clicking and typing, as well as related parameters like the coordinates for clicks. Current end-to-end grounding models still achieve less than 65% accuracy on challenging benchmarks like ScreenSpot-pro and UI-Vision, indicating they are far from being ready for deployment. % , as a single misclick can result in unacceptable consequences. In this work, we conduct an empirical study on the training of grounding models, examining details from data collection to model training. Ultimately, we developed the Phi-Ground model family, which achieves state-of-the-art performance across all five grounding benchmarks for models under 10B parameters in agent settings. In the end-to-end model setting, our model still achieves SOTA results with scores of textit43.2 on ScreenSpot-pro and textit27.2 on UI-Vision. We believe that the various details discussed in this paper, along with our successes and failures, not only clarify the construction of grounding models but also benefit other perception tasks. Project homepage: hrefhttps://zhangmiaosen2000.github.io/Phi-Ground/https://zhangmiaosen2000.github.io/Phi-Ground/

Key facts. Cited by 24 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 64 of its 79 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 31 Jul 2025.

Builds on

64 of 79 references.

Closest ancestors · 6

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025GUI-G1: Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training for Visual Grounding in GUI Agents21 May
  2. 2025Visual Test-time Scaling for GUI Agent Grounding1 May
  3. 2025InfiGUI-R1: Advancing Multimodal GUI Agents from Reactive Actors to Deliberative Reasoners19 Apr
  4. 2025UI-R1: Enhancing Efficient Action Prediction of GUI Agents by Reinforcement Learning27 Mar
  5. 2024Aguvis: Unified Pure Vision Agents for Autonomous GUI Interaction5 Dec
  6. 2023BenchLMM: Benchmarking Cross-style Visual Capability of Large Multimodal Models5 Dec

Other references · 58

  1. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 14,441
  2. 2023Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Modelscited by 12,865
  3. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
  4. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,195
  5. 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Modelcited by 7,916
  6. 2020Scaling Laws for Neural Language Modelscited by 6,411
  7. 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,146
  8. 2022Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedbackcited by 3,634
  9. 2022Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Modelscited by 2,927
  10. 2023A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agentscited by 2,203
  11. 2021WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedbackcited by 1,722
  12. 2023The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Surveycited by 1,422
38 more
  1. 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Webcited by 1,210
  2. 2023A General Theoretical Paradigm to Understand Learning from Human Preferencescited by 906
  3. 2023Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magiccited by 891
  4. 2022OFA: Unifying Architectures, Tasks, and Modalities Through a Simple Sequence-to-Sequence Learning Frameworkcited by 742
  5. 2025UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agentscited by 584
  6. 2017Deep Learning Scaling is Predictable, Empiricallycited by 556
  7. 2024SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agentscited by 553
  8. 2022GIT: A Generative Image-to-text Transformer for Vision and Languagecited by 536
  9. 2024BLINK: Multimodal Large Language Models Can See but Not Perceivecited by 529
  10. 2023VisionLLM: Large Language Model is also an Open-Ended Decoder for Vision-Centric Taskscited by 499
  11. 2023Ferret: Refer and Ground Anything Anywhere at Any Granularitycited by 498
  12. 2025Phi-4-Mini Technical Report: Compact yet Powerful Multimodal Language Models via Mixture-of-LoRAscited by 491
  13. 2022Unified-IO: A Unified Model for Vision, Language, and Multi-Modal Taskscited by 420
  14. 2023SLiC-HF: Sequence Likelihood Calibration with Human Feedbackcited by 395
  15. 2024Navigating the Digital World as Humans Do: Universal Visual Grounding for GUI Agentscited by 373
  16. 2024OS-ATLAS: A Foundation Action Model for Generalist GUI Agentscited by 370
  17. 2018Reinforcement Learning on Web Interfaces Using Workflow-Guided Explorationcited by 282
  18. 2025ScreenSpot-Pro: GUI Grounding for Professional High-Resolution Computer Usecited by 246
  19. 2025GUI-R1 : A Generalist R1-Style Vision-Language Action Model For GUI Agentscited by 240
  20. 2024Self-Play Preference Optimization for Language Model Alignmentcited by 228
  21. 2024OmniParser for Pure Vision Based GUI Agentcited by 193
  22. 2024A Careful Examination of Large Language Model Performance on Grade School Arithmeticcited by 188
  23. 2024Large Language Model-Brained GUI Agents: A Surveycited by 160
  24. 2024Provably Robust DPO: Aligning Language Models with Noisy Feedbackcited by 133
  25. 2024Exploring Large Language Model based Intelligent Agents: Definitions, Methods, and Prospectscited by 130
  26. 2021UniTAB: Unifying Text and Box Outputs for Grounded Vision-Language Modelingcited by 122
  27. 2024GUICourse: From General Vision Language Models to Versatile GUI Agentscited by 112
  28. 2023Skywork: A More Open Bilingual Foundation Modelcited by 110
  29. 2024Learning Dynamics of LLM Finetuningcited by 93
  30. 2024Noise Contrastive Alignment of Language Models with Explicit Rewardscited by 85
  31. 2025UI-Vision: A Desktop-centric GUI Benchmark for Visual Perception and Interactioncited by 68
  32. 2024Anchored Preference Optimization and Contrastive Revisions: Addressing Underspecification in Alignmentcited by 46
  33. 2024Modeling Caption Diversity in Contrastive Vision-Language Pretrainingcited by 42
  34. 2024Online DPO: Online Direct Preference Optimization with Fast-Slow Chasingcited by 38
  35. 2024Discovering Preference Optimization Algorithms with and for Large Language Modelscited by 38
  36. 2024Towards Efficient Exact Optimization of Language Model Alignmentcited by 37
  37. 2025A Comprehensive Survey of Agents for Computer Use: Foundations, Challenges, and Future Directionscited by 33
  38. 2024Distributional Preference Alignment of LLMs via Optimal Transportcited by 26

50 most cited of 58 All 58 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 10; 2026: 14.

24 papers.

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By area:

  1. 2025MAI-UI Technical Report: Real-World Centric Foundation GUI Agentscited by 88
  2. 2026CUA-Skill: Develop Skills for Computer Using Agentcited by 32
  3. 2025UI-Ins: Enhancing GUI Grounding with Multi-Perspective Instruction-as-Reasoningcited by 20
  4. 2025Grounding Computer Use Agents on Human Demonstrationscited by 16
  5. 2026GUI-Libra: Training Native GUI Agents to Reason and Act with Action-aware Supervision and Partially Verifiable RLcited by 14
  6. 2026OmegaUse: Building a General-Purpose GUI Agent for Autonomous Task Executioncited by 13
  7. 2025IAG: Input-aware Backdoor Attack on VLM-based Visual Groundingcited by 11
  8. 2025MVP: Multiple View Prediction Improves GUI Groundingcited by 10
  9. 2025Improving GUI Grounding with Explicit Position-to-Coordinate Mappingcited by 3
  10. 2025AppSelectBench: Application-Level Tool Selection Benchmarkcited by 3
  11. 2025Beyond Clicking:A Step Towards Generalist GUI Grounding via Text Draggingcited by 3
  12. 2026POINTS-GUI-G: GUI-Grounding Journeycited by 3
12 more
  1. 2026CUA-Suite: Massive Human-annotated Video Demonstrations for Computer-Use Agentscited by 3
  2. 2026GUI Agents with Reinforcement Learning: Toward Digital Inhabitantscited by 3
  3. 2026HyMobileAgent: Data-Environment Co-Scaling for Efficient GUI Agentscited by 3
  4. 2026Towards GUI Agents: Vision-Language Diffusion Models for GUI Groundingcited by 2
  5. 2025D-Artemis: A Deliberative Cognitive Framework for Mobile GUI Multi-Agentscited by 1
  6. 2026BAMI: Training-Free Bias Mitigation in GUI Groundingcited by 1
  7. 2026One Forward Beats Two: InnerZoom for Accurate and Efficient GUI Groundingcited by 1
  8. 2025A Multimodal GUI Architecture for Interfacing with LLM-Based Conversational Assistantscited by 0
  9. 2026Covering Human Action Space for Computer Use: Data Synthesis and Benchmarkcited by 0
  10. 2026WinDeskGround: A Benchmark for Robust GUI Grounding in Complex Multi-Window Desktop Environmentscited by 0
  11. 2026MissClick: Execution-Aware Adversarial Attacks on Coordinate Generation in GUI Grounding Modelscited by 0
  12. 2026Learning from Reliable Negatives: Confidence-Anchored Test-Time Adaptation for GUI Groundingcited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Learning GUI Grounding with Spatial Reasoning from Visual Feedback
  2. 2026GoClick: Lightweight Element Grounding Model for Autonomous GUI Interaction
  3. 2024Aria-UI: Visual Grounding for GUI Instructions
  4. 2024Improved GUI Grounding via Iterative Narrowing
  5. 2025Scaling Computer-Use Grounding via User Interface Decomposition and Synthesis
  6. 2025MEGA-GUI: Multi-stage Enhanced Grounding Agents for GUI Elements
  7. 2025How Auxiliary Reasoning Unleashes GUI Grounding in VLMs
  8. 2026GUI-Eyes: Tool-Augmented Perception for Visual Grounding in GUI Agents