# HiconAgent: History Context-aware Policy Optimization for GUI Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01763 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01763/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 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 40 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [GUI and mobile agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/gui-and-mobile-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [An Image is Worth 1/2 Tokens After Layer 2: Plug-and-Play Inference Acceleration for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06764/) (2024)
- [SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10935/) (2024)
- [Visual-RFT: Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01785/) (2025)
- [Navigating the Digital World as Humans Do: Universal Visual Grounding for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05243/) (2024)
- [OS-ATLAS: A Foundation Action Model for Generalist GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23218/) (2024)
- [Android in the Wild: A Large-Scale Dataset for Android Device Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10088/) (2023)
- [Mobile-Agent: Autonomous Multi-Modal Mobile Device Agent with Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16158/) (2024)
- [Aguvis: Unified Pure Vision Agents for Autonomous GUI Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04454/) (2024)
- [GUI-R1 : A Generalist R1-Style Vision-Language Action Model For GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10458/) (2025)
- [ReFT: Reasoning with Reinforced Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08967/) (2024)
- [On the Effects of Data Scale on UI Control Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03679/) (2024)
- [GUIOdyssey: A Comprehensive Dataset for Cross-App GUI Navigation on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08451/) (2024)
- [InfiGUI-R1: Advancing Multimodal GUI Agents from Reactive Actors to Deliberative Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14239/) (2025)
- [AMEX: Android Multi-annotation Expo Dataset for Mobile GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17490/) (2024)
- [Detecting and Grounding Multi-Modal Media Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02556/) (2023)
- [Optimus-1: Hybrid Multimodal Memory Empowered Agents Excel in Long-Horizon Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03615/) (2024)
- [LION : Empowering Multimodal Large Language Model with Dual-Level Visual Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11860/) (2023)
- [SPA-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for SmartPhone Agent Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15164/) (2024)
- [CogVLA: Cognition-Aligned Vision-Language-Action Model via Instruction-Driven Routing & Sparsification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21046/) (2025)
- [Cross-modal Information Flow in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18620/) (2024)
- [LION-FS: Fast & Slow Video-Language Thinker as Online Video Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03663/) (2025)
- [Detecting and Grounding Multi-Modal Media Manipulation and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14203/) (2023)
- [MoME: Mixture of Multimodal Experts for Generalist Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12709/) (2024)
- [GUI-explorer: Autonomous Exploration and Mining of Transition-aware Knowledge for GUI Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16827/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Emotional Generation Capability of Large Language Models via Emotional Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06836/) (2024)
- [UI-AGILE: Advancing GUI Agents with Effective Reinforcement Learning and Precise Inference-Time Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22025/) (2025)
- [Optimus-2: Multimodal Minecraft Agent with Goal-Observation-Action Conditioned Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19902/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Global Prior Meets Local Consistency: Dual-Memory Augmented Vision-Language-Action Model for Efficient Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20200/) (2026)
- [PersonalAlign: Hierarchical Implicit Intent Alignment for Personalized GUI Agent with Long-Term User-Centric Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09636/) (2026)
- [DeltaVLA: Prior-Guided Vision-Language-Action Models via World Knowledge Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08361/) (2026)
- [HATS: Hardness-Aware Trajectory Synthesis for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12138/) (2026)
- [ConsisVLA-4D: Advancing Spatiotemporal Consistency in Efficient 3D-Perception and 4D-Reasoning for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05126/) (2026)
- [From Abstraction to Instantiation: Learning Behavioral Representation for Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22671/) (2026)
- [UI-Copilot: Advancing Long-Horizon GUI Automation via Tool-Integrated Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13822/) (2026)
- [Software Engineering for and with GUI Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09278/) (2026)
- [UniMPA: A Unified Memory-Prediction-Action Model via Action-Grounded Transition Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.11875/) (2026)
- [LookAgain: Closed-Loop GUI Grounding with Visually Grounded Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09723/) (2026)
- [Benchmarking General Mobile Assistants in Challenging Real-World Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27477/) (2026)
- [Efficient GUI Agents: A Systems Survey of Observation, Memory, Action, and Runtime Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02309/) (2026)
- [Learning to Use Imagination: Progress-Conditioned Future Utilization for World Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06578/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents require effective use of historical context to perform sequential navigation tasks. While incorporating past actions and observations can improve decision making, naive use of full history leads to excessive computational overhead and distraction from irrelevant information. To address this, we introduce HiconAgent, a GUI agent trained with History Context-aware Policy Optimization (HCPO) for efficient and effective utilization of historical information. HCPO optimizes history usage in both sampling and policy updates through two complementary components: (1) Dynamic Context Sampling (DCS) presents the agent with variable length histories during sampling, enabling adaptive use of the most relevant context; (2) Anchor-guided History Compression (AHC) refines the policy update phase with a dual branch strategy where the compressed branch removes history observations while keeping history actions as information flow anchors. The compressed and uncompressed branches are coupled through a history-enhanced alignment loss to enforce consistent history usage while maintaining efficiency. Experiments on mainstream GUI navigation benchmarks demonstrate strong performance. Despite being smaller, HiconAgent-3B outperforms GUI-R1-7B by +8.46 percent grounding accuracy and +11.32 percent step success rate on GUI-Odyssey, while achieving comparable results on AndroidControl and AITW with up to 2.47x computational speedup and 60 percent FLOPs reduction.