Hi-Agent: Hierarchical Vision-Language Agents for Mobile Device Control
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → GUI and mobile agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Building agents that autonomously operate mobile devices has attracted increasing attention. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show promise, most existing approaches rely on direct state-to-action mappings, which lack structured reasoning and planning, and thus generalize poorly to novel tasks or unseen UI layouts. We introduce Hi-Agent, a trainable hierarchical vision-language agent for mobile control, featuring a high-level reasoning model and a low-level action model that are jointly optimized. For efficient training, we reformulate multi-step decision-making as a sequence of single-step subgoals and propose a foresight advantage function, which leverages execution feedback from the low-level model to guide high-level optimization. This design alleviates the path explosion issue encountered by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) in long-horizon tasks and enables stable, critic-free joint training. Hi-Agent achieves a new State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) 87.9% task success rate on the Android-in-the-Wild (AitW) benchmark, significantly outperforming prior methods across three paradigms: prompt-based (AppAgent: 17.7%), supervised (Filtered BC: 54.5%), and reinforcement learning-based (DigiRL: 71.9%). It also demonstrates competitive zero-shot generalization on the ScreenSpot-v2 benchmark. On the more challenging AndroidWorld benchmark, Hi-Agent also scales effectively with larger backbones, showing strong adaptability in high-complexity mobile control scenarios.
Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in GUI and mobile agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 33 of its 40 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2025.
Builds on
33 of 40 references.
Closest ancestors · 13
Same direction, newest first
- 2025UI-Venus Technical Report: Building High-performance UI Agents with RFT14 Aug
- 2025Agent S2: A Compositional Generalist-Specialist Framework for Computer Use Agents1 Apr
- 2025Digi-Q: Learning Q-Value Functions for Training Device-Control Agents13 Feb
- 2025UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agents21 Jan
- 2024OS-ATLAS: A Foundation Action Model for Generalist GUI Agents30 Oct
- 2024SPA-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for SmartPhone Agent Evaluation19 Oct
- 2024Navigating the Digital World as Humans Do: Universal Visual Grounding for GUI Agents7 Oct
- 2024DigiRL: Training In-The-Wild Device-Control Agents with Autonomous Reinforcement Learning14 Jun
- 2024Mobile-Agent-v2: Mobile Device Operation Assistant with Effective Navigation via Multi-Agent Collaboration3 Jun
- 2024Mobile-Agent: Autonomous Multi-Modal Mobile Device Agent with Visual Perception29 Jan
- 2023AppAgent: Multimodal Agents as Smartphone Users21 Dec
- 2023CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agents14 Dec
1 more
Other references · 20
- 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,399
- 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
- 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,971
- 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,599
- 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 14,132
- 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
- 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,626
- 2023Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 7,869
- 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,587
- 2024Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolutioncited by 4,234
- 2019ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Taskscited by 2,222
- 2023ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Developmentcited by 919
8 more
- 2024GPT-4V(ision) is a Generalist Web Agent, if Groundedcited by 563
- 2025VLM-R1: A Stable and Generalizable R1-style Large Vision-Language Modelcited by 526
- 2024AndroidWorld: A Dynamic Benchmarking Environment for Autonomous Agentscited by 468
- 2023Android in the Wild: A Large-Scale Dataset for Android Device Controlcited by 319
- 2024Personal LLM Agents: Insights and Survey about the Capability, Efficiency and Securitycited by 260
- 2023Auto-GPT for Online Decision Making: Benchmarks and Additional Opinionscited by 255
- 2024Aria-UI: Visual Grounding for GUI Instructionscited by 140
- 2024Autonomous Evaluation and Refinement of Digital Agentscited by 137
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 5.
5 papers.
- 2026GUI Agents with Reinforcement Learning: Toward Digital Inhabitantscited by 3
- 2026SeerGuard: A Safety Framework for Mobile GUI Agents via World Model Predictioncited by 3
- 2026Jev-Mobile: Jev as an Executor for Mobile GUI Agentscited by 3
- 2026Improving Proficiency and Efficiency of Android GUI Agents via Self-Generating Tool Actionscited by 1
- 2026Decoupling What from Where: How Should a Small GUI Grounding Model Receive the Action Type?cited by 0
- 2026Decoupling What from Where: How Should a Small GUI Grounding Model Receive the Action Type?5 Oct 2026
- 2026Jev-Mobile: Jev as an Executor for Mobile GUI Agents24 Sep 2026
- 2026Improving Proficiency and Efficiency of Android GUI Agents via Self-Generating Tool Actions6 Sep 2026
- 2026SeerGuard: A Safety Framework for Mobile GUI Agents via World Model Prediction17 Jul 2026
- 2026GUI Agents with Reinforcement Learning: Toward Digital Inhabitants30 Apr 2026
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- 2025MobileUse: A GUI Agent with Hierarchical Reflection for Autonomous Mobile Operation
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