# Learning GUI Grounding with Spatial Reasoning from Visual Feedback

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21552 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21552/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 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 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Sep 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12326/) (2025)
- [OS-ATLAS: A Foundation Action Model for Generalist GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23218/) (2024)
- [Aguvis: Unified Pure Vision Agents for Autonomous GUI Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04454/) (2024)
- [ScreenSpot-Pro: GUI Grounding for Professional High-Resolution Computer Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07981/) (2025)
- [GUI-R1 : A Generalist R1-Style Vision-Language Action Model For GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10458/) (2025)
- [OmniParser for Pure Vision Based GUI Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00203/) (2024)
- [UI-R1: Enhancing Efficient Action Prediction of GUI Agents by Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21620/) (2025)
- [InfiGUI-R1: Advancing Multimodal GUI Agents from Reactive Actors to Deliberative Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14239/) (2025)
- [Scaling Computer-Use Grounding via User Interface Decomposition and Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13227/) (2025)
- [GTA1: GUI Test-time Scaling Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05791/) (2025)
- [GUI-Actor: Coordinate-Free Visual Grounding for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03143/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Visual Grounding for GUI Agents via Self-Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12370/) (2025)
- [GUI-G1: Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training for Visual Grounding in GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15810/) (2025)
- [GUI-G2: Gaussian Reward Modeling for GUI Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15846/) (2025)
- [UFO2: The Desktop AgentOS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14603/) (2025)
- [Why Do MLLMs Struggle with Spatial Understanding? A Systematic Analysis from Data to Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02359/) (2025)
- [Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for GUI Grounding via Region Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05615/) (2025)
- [LPO: Towards Accurate GUI Agent Interaction via Location Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09373/) (2025)
- [GUI-ARP: Enhancing Grounding with Adaptive Region Perception for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15532/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [MVP: Multiple View Prediction Improves GUI Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08529/) (2025)
- [Continual GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20732/) (2026)
- [UFO3: Weaving the Digital Agent Galaxy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11332/) (2025)
- [CUA-Suite: Massive Human-annotated Video Demonstrations for Computer-Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24440/) (2026)
- [Measure Twice, Click Once: Co-evolving Proposer and Visual Critic via Reinforcement Learning for GUI Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21268/) (2026)
- [DRS-GUI: Dynamic Region Search for Training-Free GUI Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15542/) (2026)
- [What Happens Before Decoding? Prefill Determines GUI Grounding in VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12549/) (2026)
- [Trust the Right Teacher: Quality-Aware Self-Distillation for GUI Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18101/) (2026)
- [MedSPOT: A Workflow-Aware Sequential Grounding Benchmark for Clinical GUI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19993/) (2026)
- [Benchmarking and Improving GUI Agents in High-Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25380/) (2026)
- [LookAgain: Closed-Loop GUI Grounding with Visually Grounded Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09723/) (2026)
- [GUI-Primitives: Diagnosing Spatial Reasoning Failures in Vision-Language GUI Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21832/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding is commonly framed as a coordinate prediction task -- given a natural language instruction, generate on-screen coordinates for actions such as clicks and keystrokes. However, recent Vision Language Models (VLMs) often fail to predict accurate numeric coordinates when processing GUI images with high resolutions and complex layouts. To address this issue, we reframe GUI grounding as an interactive search task, where the VLM generates actions to move a cursor in the GUI to locate UI elements. At each step, the model determines the target object, evaluates the spatial relations between the cursor and the target, and moves the cursor closer to the target conditioned on the movement history. In this interactive process, the rendered cursor provides visual feedback to help the model align its predictions with the corresponding on-screen locations. We train our GUI grounding model, GUI-Cursor, using multi-step online reinforcement learning with a dense trajectory-based reward function. Experimental results demonstrate that GUI-Cursor surpasses strong baselines in GUI grounding and agentic tasks, achieving superior performance with the same base models while requiring less training data. Further analysis shows that GUI-Cursor learns to adaptively conduct more steps on more difficult examples, and it obtains better spatial reasoning capability on out-of-distribution domains.