Phi-Ground Tech Report: Advancing Perception in GUI Grounding
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
- 2025GUI-G1: Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training for Visual Grounding in GUI Agents21 May
- 2025Visual Test-time Scaling for GUI Agent Grounding1 May
- 2025InfiGUI-R1: Advancing Multimodal GUI Agents from Reactive Actors to Deliberative Reasoners19 Apr
- 2025UI-R1: Enhancing Efficient Action Prediction of GUI Agents by Reinforcement Learning27 Mar
- 2024Aguvis: Unified Pure Vision Agents for Autonomous GUI Interaction5 Dec
- 2023BenchLMM: Benchmarking Cross-style Visual Capability of Large Multimodal Models5 Dec
Other references · 58
- 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 14,441
- 2023Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Modelscited by 12,865
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- 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,195
- 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Modelcited by 7,916
- 2020Scaling Laws for Neural Language Modelscited by 6,411
- 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,146
- 2022Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedbackcited by 3,634
- 2022Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Modelscited by 2,927
- 2023A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agentscited by 2,203
- 2021WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedbackcited by 1,722
- 2023The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Surveycited by 1,422
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- 2023A General Theoretical Paradigm to Understand Learning from Human Preferencescited by 906
- 2023Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magiccited by 891
- 2022OFA: Unifying Architectures, Tasks, and Modalities Through a Simple Sequence-to-Sequence Learning Frameworkcited by 742
- 2025UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agentscited by 584
- 2017Deep Learning Scaling is Predictable, Empiricallycited by 556
- 2024SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agentscited by 553
- 2022GIT: A Generative Image-to-text Transformer for Vision and Languagecited by 536
- 2024BLINK: Multimodal Large Language Models Can See but Not Perceivecited by 529
- 2023VisionLLM: Large Language Model is also an Open-Ended Decoder for Vision-Centric Taskscited by 499
- 2023Ferret: Refer and Ground Anything Anywhere at Any Granularitycited by 498
- 2025Phi-4-Mini Technical Report: Compact yet Powerful Multimodal Language Models via Mixture-of-LoRAscited by 491
- 2022Unified-IO: A Unified Model for Vision, Language, and Multi-Modal Taskscited by 420
- 2023SLiC-HF: Sequence Likelihood Calibration with Human Feedbackcited by 395
- 2024Navigating the Digital World as Humans Do: Universal Visual Grounding for GUI Agentscited by 373
- 2024OS-ATLAS: A Foundation Action Model for Generalist GUI Agentscited by 370
- 2018Reinforcement Learning on Web Interfaces Using Workflow-Guided Explorationcited by 282
- 2025ScreenSpot-Pro: GUI Grounding for Professional High-Resolution Computer Usecited by 246
- 2025GUI-R1 : A Generalist R1-Style Vision-Language Action Model For GUI Agentscited by 240
- 2024Self-Play Preference Optimization for Language Model Alignmentcited by 228
- 2024OmniParser for Pure Vision Based GUI Agentcited by 193
- 2024A Careful Examination of Large Language Model Performance on Grade School Arithmeticcited by 188
- 2024Large Language Model-Brained GUI Agents: A Surveycited by 160
- 2024Provably Robust DPO: Aligning Language Models with Noisy Feedbackcited by 133
- 2024Exploring Large Language Model based Intelligent Agents: Definitions, Methods, and Prospectscited by 130
- 2021UniTAB: Unifying Text and Box Outputs for Grounded Vision-Language Modelingcited by 122
- 2024GUICourse: From General Vision Language Models to Versatile GUI Agentscited by 112
- 2023Skywork: A More Open Bilingual Foundation Modelcited by 110
- 2024Learning Dynamics of LLM Finetuningcited by 93
- 2024Noise Contrastive Alignment of Language Models with Explicit Rewardscited by 85
- 2025UI-Vision: A Desktop-centric GUI Benchmark for Visual Perception and Interactioncited by 68
- 2024Anchored Preference Optimization and Contrastive Revisions: Addressing Underspecification in Alignmentcited by 46
- 2024Modeling Caption Diversity in Contrastive Vision-Language Pretrainingcited by 42
- 2024Online DPO: Online Direct Preference Optimization with Fast-Slow Chasingcited by 38
- 2024Discovering Preference Optimization Algorithms with and for Large Language Modelscited by 38
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- 2025A Comprehensive Survey of Agents for Computer Use: Foundations, Challenges, and Future Directionscited by 33
- 2024Distributional Preference Alignment of LLMs via Optimal Transportcited by 26
50 most cited of 58 All 58 (JSON)
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 10; 2026: 14.
24 papers.
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- 2025MAI-UI Technical Report: Real-World Centric Foundation GUI Agentscited by 88
- 2026CUA-Skill: Develop Skills for Computer Using Agentcited by 32
- 2025UI-Ins: Enhancing GUI Grounding with Multi-Perspective Instruction-as-Reasoningcited by 20
- 2025Grounding Computer Use Agents on Human Demonstrationscited by 16
- 2026GUI-Libra: Training Native GUI Agents to Reason and Act with Action-aware Supervision and Partially Verifiable RLcited by 14
- 2026OmegaUse: Building a General-Purpose GUI Agent for Autonomous Task Executioncited by 13
- 2025IAG: Input-aware Backdoor Attack on VLM-based Visual Groundingcited by 11
- 2025MVP: Multiple View Prediction Improves GUI Groundingcited by 10
- 2025Improving GUI Grounding with Explicit Position-to-Coordinate Mappingcited by 3
- 2025AppSelectBench: Application-Level Tool Selection Benchmarkcited by 3
- 2025Beyond Clicking:A Step Towards Generalist GUI Grounding via Text Draggingcited by 3
- 2026POINTS-GUI-G: GUI-Grounding Journeycited by 3
12 more
- 2026CUA-Suite: Massive Human-annotated Video Demonstrations for Computer-Use Agentscited by 3
- 2026GUI Agents with Reinforcement Learning: Toward Digital Inhabitantscited by 3
- 2026HyMobileAgent: Data-Environment Co-Scaling for Efficient GUI Agentscited by 3
- 2026Towards GUI Agents: Vision-Language Diffusion Models for GUI Groundingcited by 2
- 2025D-Artemis: A Deliberative Cognitive Framework for Mobile GUI Multi-Agentscited by 1
- 2026BAMI: Training-Free Bias Mitigation in GUI Groundingcited by 1
- 2026One Forward Beats Two: InnerZoom for Accurate and Efficient GUI Groundingcited by 1
- 2025A Multimodal GUI Architecture for Interfacing with LLM-Based Conversational Assistantscited by 0
- 2026Covering Human Action Space for Computer Use: Data Synthesis and Benchmarkcited by 0
- 2026WinDeskGround: A Benchmark for Robust GUI Grounding in Complex Multi-Window Desktop Environmentscited by 0
- 2026MissClick: Execution-Aware Adversarial Attacks on Coordinate Generation in GUI Grounding Modelscited by 0
- 2026Learning from Reliable Negatives: Confidence-Anchored Test-Time Adaptation for GUI Groundingcited by 0
- 2026Learning from Reliable Negatives: Confidence-Anchored Test-Time Adaptation for GUI Grounding14 Sep 2026
- 2026MissClick: Execution-Aware Adversarial Attacks on Coordinate Generation in GUI Grounding Models4 Aug 2026
- 2026HyMobileAgent: Data-Environment Co-Scaling for Efficient GUI Agents16 Jul 2026
- 2026One Forward Beats Two: InnerZoom for Accurate and Efficient GUI Grounding29 Jun 2026
- 2026WinDeskGround: A Benchmark for Robust GUI Grounding in Complex Multi-Window Desktop Environments13 May 2026
- 2026Covering Human Action Space for Computer Use: Data Synthesis and Benchmark12 May 2026
- 2026BAMI: Training-Free Bias Mitigation in GUI Grounding7 May 2026
- 2026GUI Agents with Reinforcement Learning: Toward Digital Inhabitants30 Apr 2026
- 2026Towards GUI Agents: Vision-Language Diffusion Models for GUI Grounding27 Mar 2026
- 2026CUA-Suite: Massive Human-annotated Video Demonstrations for Computer-Use Agents25 Mar 2026
- 2026GUI-Libra: Training Native GUI Agents to Reason and Act with Action-aware Supervision and Partially Verifiable RL25 Feb 2026
- 2026POINTS-GUI-G: GUI-Grounding Journey6 Feb 2026
12 more
- 2026CUA-Skill: Develop Skills for Computer Using Agent28 Jan 2026
- 2026OmegaUse: Building a General-Purpose GUI Agent for Autonomous Task Execution28 Jan 2026
- 2025MAI-UI Technical Report: Real-World Centric Foundation GUI Agents26 Dec 2025
- 2025MVP: Multiple View Prediction Improves GUI Grounding9 Dec 2025
- 2025AppSelectBench: Application-Level Tool Selection Benchmark25 Nov 2025
- 2025Grounding Computer Use Agents on Human Demonstrations10 Nov 2025
- 2025Beyond Clicking:A Step Towards Generalist GUI Grounding via Text Dragging7 Nov 2025
- 2025UI-Ins: Enhancing GUI Grounding with Multi-Perspective Instruction-as-Reasoning23 Oct 2025
- 2025Improving GUI Grounding with Explicit Position-to-Coordinate Mapping3 Oct 2025
- 2025D-Artemis: A Deliberative Cognitive Framework for Mobile GUI Multi-Agents26 Sep 2025
- 2025A Multimodal GUI Architecture for Interfacing with LLM-Based Conversational Assistants31 Aug 2025
- 2025IAG: Input-aware Backdoor Attack on VLM-based Visual Grounding13 Aug 2025
- 2025MAI-UI Technical Report: Real-World Centric Foundation GUI Agentscited by 88
- 2025UI-Ins: Enhancing GUI Grounding with Multi-Perspective Instruction-as-Reasoningcited by 20
- 2025Grounding Computer Use Agents on Human Demonstrationscited by 16
- 2026GUI-Libra: Training Native GUI Agents to Reason and Act with Action-aware Supervision and Partially Verifiable RLcited by 14
- 2026OmegaUse: Building a General-Purpose GUI Agent for Autonomous Task Executioncited by 13
- 2026CUA-Suite: Massive Human-annotated Video Demonstrations for Computer-Use Agentscited by 3
- 2026GUI Agents with Reinforcement Learning: Toward Digital Inhabitantscited by 3
- 2025D-Artemis: A Deliberative Cognitive Framework for Mobile GUI Multi-Agentscited by 1
- 2026Covering Human Action Space for Computer Use: Data Synthesis and Benchmarkcited by 0
- 2026Covering Human Action Space for Computer Use: Data Synthesis and Benchmark12 May 2026
- 2026GUI Agents with Reinforcement Learning: Toward Digital Inhabitants30 Apr 2026
- 2026CUA-Suite: Massive Human-annotated Video Demonstrations for Computer-Use Agents25 Mar 2026
- 2026GUI-Libra: Training Native GUI Agents to Reason and Act with Action-aware Supervision and Partially Verifiable RL25 Feb 2026
- 2026OmegaUse: Building a General-Purpose GUI Agent for Autonomous Task Execution28 Jan 2026
- 2025MAI-UI Technical Report: Real-World Centric Foundation GUI Agents26 Dec 2025
- 2025Grounding Computer Use Agents on Human Demonstrations10 Nov 2025
- 2025UI-Ins: Enhancing GUI Grounding with Multi-Perspective Instruction-as-Reasoning23 Oct 2025
- 2025D-Artemis: A Deliberative Cognitive Framework for Mobile GUI Multi-Agents26 Sep 2025
- 2025IAG: Input-aware Backdoor Attack on VLM-based Visual Groundingcited by 11
- 2026HyMobileAgent: Data-Environment Co-Scaling for Efficient GUI Agentscited by 3
- 2026Towards GUI Agents: Vision-Language Diffusion Models for GUI Groundingcited by 2
- 2026WinDeskGround: A Benchmark for Robust GUI Grounding in Complex Multi-Window Desktop Environmentscited by 0
- 2026HyMobileAgent: Data-Environment Co-Scaling for Efficient GUI Agents16 Jul 2026
- 2026WinDeskGround: A Benchmark for Robust GUI Grounding in Complex Multi-Window Desktop Environments13 May 2026
- 2026Towards GUI Agents: Vision-Language Diffusion Models for GUI Grounding27 Mar 2026
- 2025IAG: Input-aware Backdoor Attack on VLM-based Visual Grounding13 Aug 2025
- 2026CUA-Skill: Develop Skills for Computer Using Agentcited by 32
- 2025MVP: Multiple View Prediction Improves GUI Groundingcited by 10
- 2025Improving GUI Grounding with Explicit Position-to-Coordinate Mappingcited by 3
- 2025AppSelectBench: Application-Level Tool Selection Benchmarkcited by 3
- 2025Beyond Clicking:A Step Towards Generalist GUI Grounding via Text Draggingcited by 3
- 2026POINTS-GUI-G: GUI-Grounding Journeycited by 3
- 2026BAMI: Training-Free Bias Mitigation in GUI Groundingcited by 1
- 2026One Forward Beats Two: InnerZoom for Accurate and Efficient GUI Groundingcited by 1
- 2025A Multimodal GUI Architecture for Interfacing with LLM-Based Conversational Assistantscited by 0
- 2026MissClick: Execution-Aware Adversarial Attacks on Coordinate Generation in GUI Grounding Modelscited by 0
- 2026Learning from Reliable Negatives: Confidence-Anchored Test-Time Adaptation for GUI Groundingcited by 0
- 2026Learning from Reliable Negatives: Confidence-Anchored Test-Time Adaptation for GUI Grounding14 Sep 2026
- 2026MissClick: Execution-Aware Adversarial Attacks on Coordinate Generation in GUI Grounding Models4 Aug 2026
- 2026One Forward Beats Two: InnerZoom for Accurate and Efficient GUI Grounding29 Jun 2026
- 2026BAMI: Training-Free Bias Mitigation in GUI Grounding7 May 2026
- 2026POINTS-GUI-G: GUI-Grounding Journey6 Feb 2026
- 2026CUA-Skill: Develop Skills for Computer Using Agent28 Jan 2026
- 2025MVP: Multiple View Prediction Improves GUI Grounding9 Dec 2025
- 2025AppSelectBench: Application-Level Tool Selection Benchmark25 Nov 2025
- 2025Beyond Clicking:A Step Towards Generalist GUI Grounding via Text Dragging7 Nov 2025
- 2025Improving GUI Grounding with Explicit Position-to-Coordinate Mapping3 Oct 2025
- 2025A Multimodal GUI Architecture for Interfacing with LLM-Based Conversational Assistants31 Aug 2025
Similar, not cited
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- 2025Learning GUI Grounding with Spatial Reasoning from Visual Feedback
- 2026GoClick: Lightweight Element Grounding Model for Autonomous GUI Interaction
- 2024Aria-UI: Visual Grounding for GUI Instructions
- 2024Improved GUI Grounding via Iterative Narrowing
- 2025Scaling Computer-Use Grounding via User Interface Decomposition and Synthesis
- 2025MEGA-GUI: Multi-stage Enhanced Grounding Agents for GUI Elements
- 2025How Auxiliary Reasoning Unleashes GUI Grounding in VLMs
- 2026GUI-Eyes: Tool-Augmented Perception for Visual Grounding in GUI Agents