# AgentProg: Empowering Long-Horizon GUI Agents with Program-Guided Context Management

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.10371 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10371/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 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 46 of its 134 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 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 46)

- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07753/) (2022)
- [UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12326/) (2025)
- [SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10935/) (2024)
- [Executable Code Actions Elicit Better LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01030/) (2024)
- [GPT-4V(ision) is a Generalist Web Agent, if Grounded](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01614/) (2024)
- [AndroidWorld: A Dynamic Benchmarking Environment for Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14573/) (2024)
- [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)
- [OS-ATLAS: A Foundation Action Model for Generalist GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23218/) (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)
- [Reinforcement Learning on Web Interfaces Using Workflow-Guided Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08802/) (2018)
- [UI-TARS-2 Technical Report: Advancing GUI Agent with Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02544/) (2025)
- [OS-Copilot: Towards Generalist Computer Agents with Self-Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07456/) (2024)
- [AdaPlanner: Adaptive Planning from Feedback with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16653/) (2023)
- [Mobile-Agent-v3: Fundamental Agents for GUI Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15144/) (2025)
- [You Only Look at Screens: Multimodal Chain-of-Action Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11436/) (2023)
- [AutoDroid: LLM-powered Task Automation in Android](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15272/) (2023)
- [Mapping Natural Language Instructions to Mobile UI Action Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03776/) (2020)
- [Agent S2: A Compositional Generalist-Specialist Framework for Computer Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00906/) (2025)
- [UFO: A UI-Focused Agent for Windows OS Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07939/) (2024)
- [GPT-4V in Wonderland: Large Multimodal Models for Zero-Shot Smartphone GUI Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07562/) (2023)
- [Cradle: Empowering Foundation Agents Towards General Computer Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03186/) (2024)
- [Inducing Programmatic Skills for Agentic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06821/) (2025)
- [AndroidLab: Training and Systematic Benchmarking of Android Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24024/) (2024)
- [On-Device Language Models: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00088/) (2024)
- [GUI Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13501/) (2024)
- [UI-Venus Technical Report: Building High-performance UI Agents with RFT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10833/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [OS-Symphony: A Holistic Framework for Robust and Generalist Computer-Using Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07779/) (2026)
- [MementoGUI: Learning Agentic Multimodal Memory Control for Long-Horizon GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18652/) (2026)
- [What Memory Do GUI Agents Really Need? From Passive Records to Active Task-Driving States](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31612/) (2026)
- [KLong: Training LLM Agent for Extremely Long-horizon Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17547/) (2026)
- [GUI Agents with Reinforcement Learning: Toward Digital Inhabitants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27955/) (2026)
- [MacAgentBench: Benchmarking AI Agents on Real-World macOS Desktop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22557/) (2026)
- [Software Engineering for and with GUI Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09278/) (2026)
- [Web Agents Should Use Typed Actions Instead of Click-Based Browsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17245/) (2026)
- [LocalLSTC: A Long Short-Term Control Architecture for Locally Deployed GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25777/) (2026)
- [PastForward: Faster On-Device GUI Agents via Computational Experience Reuse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32166/) (2026)
- [Pack Light, CarryOn: Building Object-Oriented Context for Long-Horizon Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18784/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid development of mobile GUI agents has stimulated growing research interest in long-horizon task automation. However, building agents for these tasks faces a critical bottleneck: the reliance on ever-expanding interaction history incurs substantial context overhead. Existing context management and compression techniques often fail to preserve vital semantic information, leading to degraded task performance. We propose AgentProg, a program-guided approach for agent context management that reframes the interaction history as a program with variables and control flow. By organizing information according to the structure of program, this structure provides a principled mechanism to determine which information should be retained and which can be discarded. We further integrate a global belief state mechanism inspired by Belief MDP framework to handle partial observability and adapt to unexpected environmental changes. Experiments on AndroidWorld and our extended long-horizon task suite demonstrate that AgentProg has achieved the state-of-the-art success rates on these benchmarks. More importantly, it maintains robust performance on long-horizon tasks while baseline methods experience catastrophic degradation. Our system is open-sourced at https://github.com/MobileLLM/AgentProg.