mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

ShowUI-π: Flow-based Generative Models as GUI Dexterous Hands

arXiv 2512.24965 ↗First posted 31 Dec 2025cs.CV cs.AI cs.HCcited by 6

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

  1. 2025OpenCUA: Open Foundations for Computer-Use Agents12 Aug
  2. 2024Navigating the Digital World as Humans Do: Universal Visual Grounding for GUI Agents7 Oct
  3. 2024GUICourse: From General Vision Language Models to Versatile GUI Agents17 Jun

Other references · 31

  1. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
  2. 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,459
  3. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
  4. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
  5. 2024Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolutioncited by 4,234
  6. 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,700
  7. 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,887
  8. 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusioncited by 2,838
  9. 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,407
  10. 2022RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scalecited by 2,061
  11. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 2,006
  12. 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,761
19 more
  1. 2022WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agentscited by 1,251
  2. 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Webcited by 1,242
  3. 2021What Matters in Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulationcited by 725
  4. 2024PaliGemma: A versatile 3B VLM for transfercited by 696
  5. 2025FAST: Efficient Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 665
  6. 2025SmolVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Affordable and Efficient Roboticscited by 530
  7. 2022Socratic Models: Composing Zero-Shot Multimodal Reasoning with Languagecited by 513
  8. 2024WorkArena: How Capable Are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?cited by 363
  9. 2023A Real-World WebAgent with Planning, Long Context Understanding, and Program Synthesiscited by 353
  10. 2024TinyVLA: Towards Fast, Data-Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulationcited by 339
  11. 2024Aguvis: Unified Pure Vision Agents for Autonomous GUI Interactioncited by 278
  12. 2025SmolVLM: Redefining small and efficient multimodal modelscited by 237
  13. 2024Ferret-UI: Grounded Mobile UI Understanding with Multimodal LLMscited by 176
  14. 2023Multimodal Web Navigation with Instruction-Finetuned Foundation Modelscited by 160
  15. 2024UFO: A UI-Focused Agent for Windows OS Interactioncited by 148
  16. 2025Magma: A Foundation Model for Multimodal AI Agentscited by 139
  17. 2023AssistGPT: A General Multi-modal Assistant that can Plan, Execute, Inspect, and Learncited by 97
  18. 2023ASSISTGUI: Task-Oriented Desktop Graphical User Interface Automationcited by 45
  19. 2024Scaling Diffusion Policy in Transformer to 1 Billion Parameters for Robotic Manipulationcited by 38

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.

6 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026ContactFlow: A video action conditioning that transfers across embodiments
  2. 2026One-Step Flow Policy: Self-Distillation for Fast Visuomotor Policies
  3. 2026BagelVLA: Enhancing Long-Horizon Manipulation via Interleaved Vision-Language-Action Generation
  4. 2025Dream2Flow: Bridging Video Generation and Open-World Manipulation with 3D Object Flow
  5. 2024Generative Image as Action Models
  6. 2025FreqPolicy: Efficient Flow-based Visuomotor Policy via Frequency Consistency
  7. 2024ShowUI: One Vision-Language-Action Model for GUI Visual Agent
  8. 2026EMPIRE: Explicit Manipulation Planning as a Learnable Intermediate Representation for Egocentric Hand-Motion Forecasting