mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

GUI-PRA: Process Reward Agent for GUI Tasks

arXiv 2509.23263 ↗First posted 27 Sep 2025cs.AIcited by 9

On the map: LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation → Process reward models for reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

Long-horizon GUI automation remains challenging due to error accumulation over extended interaction sequences. Process Reward Models (PRMs) provide dense step-level supervision for mitigating error accumulation, yet standard PRMs are poorly suited to GUI verification. Standard PRM judgments often rely on superficial visual alignment rather than functional correctness, reflecting an evaluative knowledge gap caused by missing domain-specific adjudication logic. Standard PRMs also perform passive, single-pass visual assessment, which creates Visual Ambiguity when reliable judgment requires actively locating, parsing, or inspecting task-relevant UI evidence. We introduce GUI-PRA, a Process Reward Agent that transforms GUI process evaluation from passive scoring into active investigation. GUI-PRA couples Experience-Injected Criterion Synthesis, which distills generalized verification principles into state-specific criteria, with Criterion-Guided Autoregressive Perception, which uses these criteria to navigate multi-granularity visual tools and gather grounded evidence. On AndroidWorld and Mobile-MiniWoB++, GUI-PRA achieves improvements of 5.0% and 6.5% over standard PRMs on the Qwen-VL series, with Qwen3-VL attaining 54.74% success rate on AndroidWorld. On the offline OS-Critic Bench, GUI-PRA demonstrates strong competitiveness against fully trained critic models.

Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Process reward models for reasoning, one of 10 directions in LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation. Builds on 23 of its 36 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 Sep 2025.

Builds on

23 of 36 references.

Closest ancestors · 2

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025UI-Genie: A Self-Improving Approach for Iteratively Boosting MLLM-based Mobile GUI Agents27 May
  2. 2025Guiding VLM Agents with Process Rewards at Inference Time for GUI Navigation22 Apr

Other references · 21

  1. 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,459
  2. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,587
  3. 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,276
  4. 2023Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedbackcited by 3,442
  5. 2025InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Modelscited by 1,834
  6. 2025InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiencycited by 1,510
  7. 2023CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agentscited by 704
  8. 2023Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 623
  9. 2024OS-ATLAS: A Foundation Action Model for Generalist GUI Agentscited by 378
  10. 2017Deep Reinforcement Learning: An Overviewcited by 333
  11. 2024Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Modelscited by 329
  12. 2018Reinforcement Learning on Web Interfaces Using Workflow-Guided Explorationcited by 284
9 more
  1. 2020Supervised Contrastive Learning for Pre-trained Language Model Fine-tuningcited by 276
  2. 2024OmniParser for Pure Vision Based GUI Agentcited by 198
  3. 2025InfiGUI-R1: Advancing Multimodal GUI Agents from Reactive Actors to Deliberative Reasonerscited by 140
  4. 2024Aria: An Open Multimodal Native Mixture-of-Experts Modelcited by 138
  5. 2025InfiGUIAgent: A Multimodal Generalist GUI Agent with Native Reasoning and Reflectioncited by 67
  6. 2025When Agents go Astray: Course-Correcting SWE Agents with PRMscited by 28
  7. 2025Evaluating the Robustness of Multimodal Agents Against Active Environmental Injection Attackscited by 22
  8. 2024MobA: Multifaceted Memory-Enhanced Adaptive Planning for Efficient Mobile Task Automationcited by 14
  9. 2025HarmonyGuard: Toward Safety and Utility in Web Agents via Adaptive Policy Enhancement and Dual-Objective Optimizationcited by 10

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 8.

9 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025GUI-Shepherd: Reliable Process Reward and Verification for Long-Sequence GUI Tasks
  2. 2026Interactive Reward Agent: GUI Task Evaluation via Environment-State Verification
  3. 2026Don't Act Blindly: Robust GUI Automation via Action-Effect Verification and Self-Correction
  4. 2025GUI Knowledge Bench: Revealing the Knowledge Gap of VLMs in GUI Tasks
  5. 2026GUI-Eyes: Tool-Augmented Perception for Visual Grounding in GUI Agents
  6. 2025ProBench: Benchmarking GUI Agents with Accurate Process Information
  7. 2026Learning Reliable GUI Agents under Imperfect Priors
  8. 2026Task-Adaptive Rubrics for GUI Reward Modeling