mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

MAI-UI Technical Report: Real-World Centric Foundation GUI Agents

arXiv 2512.22047 ↗First posted 26 Dec 2025cs.CVcited by 91

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → GUI and mobile agents

Abstract (arXiv)

The development of GUI agents could revolutionize the next generation of human-computer interaction. Motivated by this vision, we present MAI-UI, a family of foundation GUI agents spanning the full spectrum of sizes, including 2B, 8B, 32B, and 235B-A22B variants. We identify four key challenges to realistic deployment: the lack of native agent-user interaction, the limits of UI-only operation, the absence of a practical deployment architecture, and brittleness in dynamic environments. MAI-UI addresses these issues with a unified methodology: a self-evolving data pipeline that expands the navigation data to include user interaction and MCP tool calls, a native device-cloud collaboration system routes execution by task state, and an online RL framework with advanced optimizations to scale parallel environments and context length. MAI-UI establishes new state-of-the-art across GUI grounding and mobile navigation. On grounding benchmarks, it reaches 73.5% on ScreenSpot-Pro, 91.3% on MMBench GUI L2, 70.9% on OSWorld-G, and 49.2% on UI-Vision, surpassing Gemini-3-Pro and Seed1.8 on ScreenSpot-Pro. On mobile GUI navigation, it sets a new SOTA of 76.7% on AndroidWorld, surpassing UI-Tars-2, Gemini-2.5-Pro and Seed1.8. On MobileWorld, MAI-UI obtains 41.7% success rate, significantly outperforming end-to-end GUI models and competitive with Gemini-3-Pro based agentic frameworks. Our online RL experiments show significant gains from scaling parallel environments from 32 to 512 (+5.2 points) and increasing environment step budget from 15 to 50 (+4.3 points). Finally, the native device-cloud collaboration system improves on-device performance by 33%, reduces cloud model calls by over 40%, and preserves user privacy.

Key facts. Cited by 91 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 45 of its 56 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 Dec 2025.

Builds on

45 of 56 references.

Closest ancestors · 27

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025MobileWorld: Benchmarking Autonomous Mobile Agents in Agent-User Interactive and MCP-Augmented Environments22 Dec
  2. 2025Step-GUI Technical Report17 Dec
  3. 2025OpenPhone: Mobile Agentic Foundation Models24 Oct
  4. 2025UI-Ins: Enhancing GUI Grounding with Multi-Perspective Instruction-as-Reasoning23 Oct
  5. 2025Ferret-UI Lite: Lessons from Building Small On-Device GUI Agents30 Sep
  6. 2025ScaleCUA: Scaling Open-Source Computer Use Agents with Cross-Platform Data18 Sep
  7. 2025UI-TARS-2 Technical Report: Advancing GUI Agent with Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning2 Sep
  8. 2025Mobile-Agent-v3: Fundamental Agents for GUI Automation21 Aug
  9. 2025UI-Venus Technical Report: Building High-performance UI Agents with RFT14 Aug
  10. 2025Phi-Ground Tech Report: Advancing Perception in GUI Grounding31 Jul
  11. 2025MMBench-GUI: Hierarchical Multi-Platform Evaluation Framework for GUI Agents25 Jul
  12. 2025GUI-Actor: Coordinate-Free Visual Grounding for GUI Agents3 Jun
15 more
  1. 2025AgentCPM-GUI: Building Mobile-Use Agents with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning2 Jun
  2. 2025GUI-G1: Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training for Visual Grounding in GUI Agents21 May
  3. 2025Scaling Computer-Use Grounding via User Interface Decomposition and Synthesis19 May
  4. 2025Enhancing Visual Grounding for GUI Agents via Self-Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning18 May
  5. 2025InfiGUI-R1: Advancing Multimodal GUI Agents from Reactive Actors to Deliberative Reasoners19 Apr
  6. 2025GUI-R1 : A Generalist R1-Style Vision-Language Action Model For GUI Agents14 Apr
  7. 2025ScreenSpot-Pro: GUI Grounding for Professional High-Resolution Computer Use4 Apr
  8. 2025UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agents21 Jan
  9. 2024GUI Agents with Foundation Models: A Comprehensive Survey7 Nov
  10. 2024AndroidLab: Training and Systematic Benchmarking of Android Autonomous Agents31 Oct
  11. 2024OS-ATLAS: A Foundation Action Model for Generalist GUI Agents30 Oct
  12. 2024Navigating the Digital World as Humans Do: Universal Visual Grounding for GUI Agents7 Oct
  13. 2024On the Effects of Data Scale on UI Control Agents6 Jun
  14. 2024Mobile-Agent: Autonomous Multi-Modal Mobile Device Agent with Visual Perception29 Jan
  15. 2024SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agents17 Jan

Other references · 18

  1. 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,330
  2. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,587
  3. 2025DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scalecited by 2,810
  4. 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,793
  5. 2024Qwen2 Technical Reportcited by 2,120
  6. 2024HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Frameworkcited by 2,057
  7. 2024A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judgecited by 1,423
  8. 2025Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 665
  9. 2024AndroidWorld: A Dynamic Benchmarking Environment for Autonomous Agentscited by 468
  10. 2025Seed1.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 373
  11. 2024Aguvis: Unified Pure Vision Agents for Autonomous GUI Interactioncited by 278
  12. 2025Seg-Zero: Reasoning-Chain Guided Segmentation via Cognitive Reinforcementcited by 239
6 more
  1. 2024GUIOdyssey: A Comprehensive Dataset for Cross-App GUI Navigation on Mobile Devicescited by 194
  2. 2025Time-R1: Post-Training Large Vision Language Model for Temporal Video Groundingcited by 146
  3. 2024Aria-UI: Visual Grounding for GUI Instructionscited by 140
  4. 2024Symbolic Learning Enables Self-Evolving Agentscited by 106
  5. 2025GTA1: GUI Test-time Scaling Agentcited by 106
  6. 2025InfiGUI-G1: Advancing GUI Grounding with Adaptive Exploration Policy Optimizationcited by 27

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 91.

91 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2026Mobile-Agent-v3.5: Multi-platform Fundamental GUI Agentscited by 79
  2. 2026UI-Venus-1.5 Technical Reportcited by 41
  3. 2026LocateAnything: Fast and High-Quality Vision-Language Grounding with Parallel Box Decodingcited by 28
  4. 2026RLAnything: Forge Environment, Policy, and Reward Model in Completely Dynamic RL Systemcited by 24
  5. 2026KnowU-Bench: Towards Interactive, Proactive, and Personalized Mobile Agent Evaluationcited by 21
  6. 2026GUI-Libra: Training Native GUI Agents to Reason and Act with Action-aware Supervision and Partially Verifiable RLcited by 16
  7. 2026MolmoPoint: Better Pointing for VLMs with Grounding Tokenscited by 15
  8. 2026ClawGUI: A Unified Framework for Training, Evaluating, and Deploying GUI Agentscited by 14
  9. 2026OmegaUse: Building a General-Purpose GUI Agent for Autonomous Task Executioncited by 13
  10. 2026MobileGym: A Verifiable and Highly Parallel Simulation Platform for Mobile GUI Agent Researchcited by 13
  11. 2026UI-Mem: Self-Evolving Experience Memory for Online Reinforcement Learning in Mobile GUI Agentscited by 12
  12. 2026The Blind Spot of Agent Safety: How Benign User Instructions Expose Critical Vulnerabilities in Computer-Use Agentscited by 12
38 more
  1. 2026UI-Voyager: A Self-Evolving GUI Agent Learning via Failed Experiencecited by 11
  2. 2026OpenMobile: Building Open Mobile Agents with Task and Trajectory Synthesiscited by 11
  3. 2026MementoGUI: Learning Agentic Multimodal Memory Control for Long-Horizon GUI Agentscited by 11
  4. 2026Qwen-UI-Agent Technical Report: Toward Next-Generation Real-World Centric Foundation GUI Agentscited by 11
  5. 2026AndroidDaily: A Verifiable Benchmark for Mobile GUI Agents on Real-World Closed-Source Applicationscited by 10
  6. 2026How Mobile World Model Guides GUI Agents?cited by 8
  7. 2026PIRA-Bench: A Transition from Reactive GUI Agents to GUI-based Proactive Intent Recommendation Agentscited by 7
  8. 2026Video2GUI: Synthesizing Large-Scale Interaction Trajectories for Generalized GUI Agent Pretrainingcited by 7
  9. 2026MobileForge: Annotation-Free Adaptation for Mobile GUI Agents with Hierarchical Feedback-Guided Policy Optimizationcited by 7
  10. 2026AdaZoom-GUI: Adaptive Zoom-based GUI Grounding with Instruction Refinementcited by 6
  11. 2026Android Coach: Improve Online Agentic Training Efficiency with Single State Multiple Actionscited by 6
  12. 2026MobileBench-OL: A Comprehensive Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Mobile GUI Agents in Real-World Environmentcited by 5
  13. 2026CUA-Suite: Massive Human-annotated Video Demonstrations for Computer-Use Agentscited by 5
  14. 2026VenusBench-Mobile: A Challenging and User-Centric Benchmark for Mobile GUI Agents with Capability Diagnosticscited by 5
  15. 2026VLAA-GUI: Knowing When to Stop, Recover, and Search, A Modular Framework for GUI Automationcited by 5
  16. 2026Xiaomi-GUI-0 Technical Reportcited by 5
  17. 2026What Memory Do GUI Agents Really Need? From Passive Records to Active Task-Driving Statescited by 5
  18. 2026Agentic Reward Modeling: Verifying GUI Agent via Progressive Trajectory-Grounded Interactioncited by 4
  19. 2026Avenir-Web: Human-Experience-Imitating Multimodal Web Agents with Mixture of Grounding Expertscited by 4
  20. 2026What Happens Before Decoding? Prefill Determines GUI Grounding in VLMscited by 4
  21. 2026SE-GA: Memory-Augmented Self-Evolution for GUI Agentscited by 4
  22. 2026UI-KOBE: Knowledge-Oriented Behavior Exploration for Lightweight Graph-Guided GUI Agentscited by 4
  23. 2026PhoneBuddy: Training Open Models for Agentic Phone Usecited by 4
  24. 2026Scaling GUI Agents with Visual State Transitionscited by 4
  25. 2026GUI Agents with Reinforcement Learning: Toward Digital Inhabitantscited by 3
  26. 2026Mem-W: Latent Memory-Native GUI Agentscited by 3
  27. 2026VISTA: View-Consistent Self-Verified Training for GUI Groundingcited by 3
  28. 2026MemGUI-Agent: An End-to-End Long-Horizon Mobile GUI Agent with Proactive Context Managementcited by 3
  29. 2026MAGA: Multi-Platform Self-Fusion of GUI Agents via Structured Action Distillationcited by 3
  30. 2026ClawMobile: Rethinking Smartphone-Native Agentic Systemscited by 2
  31. 2026ScaleWoB: Guiding GUI Agents with Coding Agents via Large-Scale Environmental Synthesiscited by 2
  32. 2026Agent Skills Should Go Beyond Text: The Case for Visual Skillscited by 2
  33. 2026StainFlow: Entity-Stain Tracking and Evidence Linking for Process Rewards in GUI Agentscited by 2
  34. 2026One Forward Beats Two: InnerZoom for Accurate and Efficient GUI Groundingcited by 2
  35. 2026UI-Venus-2 Technical Reportcited by 2
  36. 2026Reflect, Revise, Reuse: Training-Free Skill Evolution for GUI Agentscited by 2
  37. 2026Coding with Eyes: Visual Feedback Unlocks Reliable GUI Code Generating and Debuggingcited by 1
  38. 2026Safe, or Simply Incapable? Rethinking Safety Evaluation for Phone-Use Agentscited by 1

50 most cited of 91 All 91 (JSON)

Similar, not cited

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  1. 2024TinyClick: Single-Turn Agent for Empowering GUI Automation
  2. 2025TransBench: Breaking Barriers for Transferable Graphical User Interface Agents in Dynamic Digital Environments
  3. 2024Falcon-UI: Understanding GUI Before Following User Instructions
  4. 2026SEE: Structure-aware Exploring & Exploiting for Long-horizon GUI Agent Trajectory Synthesis
  5. 2026JarvisGUI: Towards Cross-Device GUI Agents with Dynamic Task Composition
  6. 2025UI-Vision: A Desktop-centric GUI Benchmark for Visual Perception and Interaction
  7. 2024GUI Agents: A Survey
  8. 2025GUIrilla: A Scalable Framework for Automated Desktop UI Exploration