mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for GUI Grounding via Region Consistency

arXiv 2508.05615 ↗First posted 7 Aug 2025cs.CV cs.AI cs.CLcited by 20

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → GUI and mobile agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding, the task of mapping natural language instructions to precise screen coordinates, is fundamental to autonomous GUI agents. While existing methods achieve strong performance through extensive supervised training or reinforcement learning with labeled rewards, they remain constrained by the cost and availability of pixel-level annotations. We observe that when models generate multiple predictions for the same GUI element, the spatial overlap patterns reveal implicit confidence signals that can guide more accurate localization. Leveraging this insight, we propose GUI-RC (Region Consistency), a test-time scaling method that constructs spatial voting grids from multiple sampled predictions to identify consensus regions where models show highest agreement. Without any training, GUI-RC improves accuracy by 2-3% across various architectures on ScreenSpot benchmarks. We further introduce GUI-RCPO (Region Consistency Policy Optimization), transforming these consistency patterns into rewards for test-time reinforcement learning. By computing how well each prediction aligns with the collective consensus, GUI-RCPO enables models to iteratively refine their outputs on unlabeled data during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate the generality of our approach: using only 1,272 unlabeled data, GUI-RCPO achieves 3-6% accuracy improvements across various architectures on ScreenSpot benchmarks. Our approach reveals the untapped potential of test-time scaling and test-time reinforcement learning for GUI grounding, offering a promising path toward more data-efficient GUI agents.

Key facts. Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in GUI and mobile agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 25 of its 28 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Aug 2025.

Builds on

25 of 28 references.

Closest ancestors · 11

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Understanding GUI Agent Localization Biases through Logit Sharpness18 Jun
  2. 2025GUI-Actor: Coordinate-Free Visual Grounding for GUI Agents3 Jun
  3. 2025GUI-G1: Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training for Visual Grounding in GUI Agents21 May
  4. 2025Visual Test-time Scaling for GUI Agent Grounding1 May
  5. 2025GUI-R1 : A Generalist R1-Style Vision-Language Action Model For GUI Agents14 Apr
  6. 2025A Survey on (M)LLM-Based GUI Agents27 Mar
  7. 2025UI-R1: Enhancing Efficient Action Prediction of GUI Agents by Reinforcement Learning27 Mar
  8. 2024OS-ATLAS: A Foundation Action Model for Generalist GUI Agents30 Oct
  9. 2024Navigating the Digital World as Humans Do: Universal Visual Grounding for GUI Agents7 Oct
  10. 2024Mobile-Agent: Autonomous Multi-Modal Mobile Device Agent with Visual Perception29 Jan
  11. 2024SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agents17 Jan

Other references · 14

  1. 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,302
  2. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
  3. 2022Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Modelscited by 5,601
  4. 2023Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedbackcited by 3,317
  5. 2023Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Modelscited by 3,155
  6. 2024Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameterscited by 1,928
  7. 2025InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Modelscited by 1,769
  8. 2025s1: Simple test-time scalingcited by 1,311
  9. 2025VLM-R1: A Stable and Generalizable R1-style Large Vision-Language Modelcited by 515
  10. 2025rStar-Math: Small LLMs Can Master Math Reasoning with Self-Evolved Deep Thinkingcited by 308
  11. 2024Aguvis: Unified Pure Vision Agents for Autonomous GUI Interactioncited by 271
  12. 2025DiMo-GUI: Advancing Test-time Scaling in GUI Grounding via Modality-Aware Visual Reasoningcited by 29
2 more
  1. 2025Think Twice, Click Once: Enhancing GUI Grounding via Fast and Slow Systemscited by 23
  2. 2025Rethinking the Role of Prompting Strategies in LLM Test-Time Scaling: A Perspective of Probability Theorycited by 10

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 4; 2026: 16.

20 papers.

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By area:

  1. 2025A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Reasoning Modelscited by 175
  2. 2025UI-S1: Advancing GUI Automation via Semi-online Reinforcement Learningcited by 32
  3. 2025Learning GUI Grounding with Spatial Reasoning from Visual Feedbackcited by 12
  4. 2026CoVerRL: Breaking the Consensus Trap in Label-Free Reasoning via Generator-Verifier Co-Evolutioncited by 9
  5. 2026Continual GUI Agentscited by 7
  6. 2026Self-Improvement of Large Language Models: A Technical Overview and Future Outlookcited by 5
  7. 2026UI-Zoomer: Uncertainty-Driven Adaptive Zoom-In for GUI Groundingcited by 5
  8. 2026UI-Copilot: Advancing Long-Horizon GUI Automation via Tool-Integrated Policy Optimizationcited by 4
  9. 2026Zoom Consistency: A Free Confidence Signal in Multi-Step Visual Grounding Pipelinescited by 4
  10. 2026Measure Twice, Click Once: Co-evolving Proposer and Visual Critic via Reinforcement Learning for GUI Groundingcited by 2
  11. 2026BAMI: Training-Free Bias Mitigation in GUI Groundingcited by 1
  12. 2026What Happens Before Decoding? Prefill Determines GUI Grounding in VLMscited by 1
8 more
  1. 2026GUI-AC: Enhancing Continual Learning in GUI Agentscited by 1
  2. 2026One Forward Beats Two: InnerZoom for Accurate and Efficient GUI Groundingcited by 1
  3. 2026Test-Time Self-Evolving GUI Visual Grounding via Reflection-Guided On-Policy Self-Distillationcited by 1
  4. 2026TTPO: Test-Time Policy Optimizationcited by 1
  5. 2025Talking Points: Describing and Localizing Pixelscited by 0
  6. 2026OS-SPEAR: A Toolkit for the Safety, Performance,Efficiency, and Robustness Analysis of OS Agentscited by 0
  7. 2026StepReflect: Structured UI Transition Reflection for Mobile GUI Agentscited by 0
  8. 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. 2025GUI-Bee: Align GUI Action Grounding to Novel Environments via Autonomous Exploration
  2. 2025GTA1: GUI Test-time Scaling Agent
  3. 2026SCA: Spatial Credit Assignment for Reinforcement Learning of GUI Agents
  4. 2026Learn where to Click from Yourself: On-Policy Self-Distillation for GUI Grounding
  5. 2025UI-AGILE: Advancing GUI Agents with Effective Reinforcement Learning and Precise Inference-Time Grounding
  6. 2025Enhancing Visual Grounding for GUI Agents via Self-Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning
  7. 2025ReGUIDE: Data Efficient GUI Grounding via Spatial Reasoning and Search
  8. 2025GuirlVG: Incentivize GUI Visual Grounding via Empirical Exploration on Reinforcement Learning