ShowUI-π: Flow-based Generative Models as GUI Dexterous Hands
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → GUI and mobile agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Building intelligent agents capable of dexterous manipulation is essential for achieving human-like automation in both robotics and digital environments. However, existing GUI agents rely on discrete click predictions (x,y), which prohibits free-form, closed-loop trajectories (e.g. dragging a progress bar) that require continuous, on-the-fly perception and adjustment. In this work, we develop ShowUI-π, the first flow-based generative model as GUI dexterous hand, featuring the following designs: (i) Unified Discrete-Continuous Actions, integrating discrete clicks and continuous drags within a shared model, enabling flexible adaptation across diverse interaction modes; (ii) Flow-based Action Generation for drag modeling, which predicts incremental cursor adjustments from continuous visual observations via a lightweight action expert, ensuring smooth and stable trajectories; (iii) Drag Training data and Benchmark, where we manually collect and synthesize 20K drag trajectories across five domains (e.g. PowerPoint, Adobe Premiere Pro), and introduce ScreenDrag, a benchmark with comprehensive online and offline evaluation protocols for assessing GUI agents' drag capabilities. Our experiments show that proprietary GUI agents still struggle on ScreenDrag (e.g. Operator scores 13.27, and the best Gemini-2.5-CUA reaches 22.18). In contrast, ShowUI-π achieves 26.98 with only 450M parameters, underscoring both the difficulty of the task and the effectiveness of our approach. We hope this work advances GUI agents toward human-like dexterous control in digital world. The code is available at https://github.com/showlab/showui-pi.
Key facts. Cited by 6 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 34 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 31 Dec 2025.
Builds on
34 of 47 references.
Closest ancestors · 3
Same direction, newest first
- 2025OpenCUA: Open Foundations for Computer-Use Agents12 Aug
- 2024Navigating the Digital World as Humans Do: Universal Visual Grounding for GUI Agents7 Oct
- 2024GUICourse: From General Vision Language Models to Versatile GUI Agents17 Jun
Other references · 31
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
- 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,459
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
- 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
- 2024Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolutioncited by 4,234
- 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,700
- 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,887
- 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusioncited by 2,838
- 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,407
- 2022RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scalecited by 2,061
- 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 2,006
- 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,761
19 more
- 2022WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agentscited by 1,251
- 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Webcited by 1,242
- 2021What Matters in Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulationcited by 725
- 2024PaliGemma: A versatile 3B VLM for transfercited by 696
- 2025FAST: Efficient Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 665
- 2025SmolVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Affordable and Efficient Roboticscited by 530
- 2022Socratic Models: Composing Zero-Shot Multimodal Reasoning with Languagecited by 513
- 2024WorkArena: How Capable Are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?cited by 363
- 2023A Real-World WebAgent with Planning, Long Context Understanding, and Program Synthesiscited by 353
- 2024TinyVLA: Towards Fast, Data-Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulationcited by 339
- 2024Aguvis: Unified Pure Vision Agents for Autonomous GUI Interactioncited by 278
- 2025SmolVLM: Redefining small and efficient multimodal modelscited by 237
- 2024Ferret-UI: Grounded Mobile UI Understanding with Multimodal LLMscited by 176
- 2023Multimodal Web Navigation with Instruction-Finetuned Foundation Modelscited by 160
- 2024UFO: A UI-Focused Agent for Windows OS Interactioncited by 148
- 2025Magma: A Foundation Model for Multimodal AI Agentscited by 139
- 2023AssistGPT: A General Multi-modal Assistant that can Plan, Execute, Inspect, and Learncited by 97
- 2023ASSISTGUI: Task-Oriented Desktop Graphical User Interface Automationcited by 45
- 2024Scaling Diffusion Policy in Transformer to 1 Billion Parameters for Robotic Manipulationcited by 38
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.
6 papers.
- 2026FocusUI: Efficient UI Grounding via Position-Preserving Visual Token Selectioncited by 10
- 2026A Survey on Foundations and Frontiers of Multimodal Agentic Frameworks: Techniques and Applicationscited by 1
- 2026Securing Computer-Use Agents: A Unified Architecture-Lifecycle Framework for Deployment-Grounded Reliabilitycited by 0
- 2026DragOn: A Benchmark and Dataset for Drag-Based GUI Interactionscited by 0
- 2026Bridging VideoQA and Video-Guided Agentic Tasks via Generalized Keyframe Extractioncited by 0
- 2026Learn from Move: the Next Step for GUI Agentscited by 0
- 2026Learn from Move: the Next Step for GUI Agents12 Oct 2026
- 2026A Survey on Foundations and Frontiers of Multimodal Agentic Frameworks: Techniques and Applications28 Jun 2026
- 2026Bridging VideoQA and Video-Guided Agentic Tasks via Generalized Keyframe Extraction28 Jun 2026
- 2026DragOn: A Benchmark and Dataset for Drag-Based GUI Interactions4 Jun 2026
- 2026Securing Computer-Use Agents: A Unified Architecture-Lifecycle Framework for Deployment-Grounded Reliability8 May 2026
- 2026FocusUI: Efficient UI Grounding via Position-Preserving Visual Token Selection7 Jan 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026ContactFlow: A video action conditioning that transfers across embodiments
- 2026One-Step Flow Policy: Self-Distillation for Fast Visuomotor Policies
- 2026BagelVLA: Enhancing Long-Horizon Manipulation via Interleaved Vision-Language-Action Generation
- 2025Dream2Flow: Bridging Video Generation and Open-World Manipulation with 3D Object Flow
- 2024Generative Image as Action Models
- 2025FreqPolicy: Efficient Flow-based Visuomotor Policy via Frequency Consistency
- 2024ShowUI: One Vision-Language-Action Model for GUI Visual Agent
- 2026EMPIRE: Explicit Manipulation Planning as a Learnable Intermediate Representation for Egocentric Hand-Motion Forecasting