# MobileRAG: Enhancing Mobile Agent with Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03891 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03891/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agentic RAG, agents and memory, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 20 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Sep 2025.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Agentic RAG, agents and memory](https://mlsanity.com/rag/agentic-rag-agents-and-memory/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [GUI and mobile agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/gui-and-mobile-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08914/) (2023)
- [AppAgent: Multimodal Agents as Smartphone Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13771/) (2023)
- [Navigating the Digital World as Humans Do: Universal Visual Grounding for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05243/) (2024)
- [A Real-World WebAgent with Planning, Long Context Understanding, and Program Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12856/) (2023)
- [Mobile-Agent: Autonomous Multi-Modal Mobile Device Agent with Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16158/) (2024)
- [VisRAG: Vision-based Retrieval-augmented Generation on Multi-modality Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10594/) (2024)
- [Real-time Scene Text Detection with Differentiable Binarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08947/) (2019)
- [Mobile-Agent-v2: Mobile Device Operation Assistant with Effective Navigation via Multi-Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01014/) (2024)
- [AutoDroid: LLM-powered Task Automation in Android](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15272/) (2023)
- [PaperQA: Retrieval-Augmented Generative Agent for Scientific Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07559/) (2023)
- [Mobile-Agent-E: Self-Evolving Mobile Assistant for Complex Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11733/) (2025)
- [META-GUI: Towards Multi-modal Conversational Agents on Mobile GUI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11029/) (2022)
- [Spotlight: Mobile UI Understanding using Vision-Language Models with a Focus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14927/) (2022)
- [Explore, Select, Derive, and Recall: Augmenting LLM with Human-like Memory for Mobile Task Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03003/) (2023)
- [Foundations and Recent Trends in Multimodal Mobile Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02006/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Smartphones have become indispensable in people's daily lives, permeating nearly every aspect of modern society. With the continuous advancement of large language models (LLMs), numerous LLM-based mobile agents have emerged. These agents are capable of accurately parsing diverse user queries and automatically assisting users in completing complex or repetitive operations. However, current agents 1) heavily rely on the comprehension ability of LLMs, which can lead to errors caused by misoperations or omitted steps during tasks, 2) lack interaction with the external environment, often terminating tasks when an app cannot fulfill user queries, and 3) lack memory capabilities, requiring each instruction to reconstruct the interface and being unable to learn from and correct previous mistakes. To alleviate the above issues, we propose MobileRAG, a mobile agents framework enhanced by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which includes InterRAG, LocalRAG, and MemRAG. It leverages RAG to more quickly and accurately identify user queries and accomplish complex and long-sequence mobile tasks. Additionally, to more comprehensively assess the performance of MobileRAG, we introduce MobileRAG-Eval, a more challenging benchmark characterized by numerous complex, real-world mobile tasks that require external knowledge assistance. Extensive experimental results on MobileRAG-Eval demonstrate that MobileRAG can easily handle real-world mobile tasks, achieving 10.3% improvement over state-of-the-art methods with fewer operational steps. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/liuxiaojieOutOfWorld/MobileRAGarxiv