GUITester: Enabling GUI Agents for Exploratory Defect Discovery

Exploratory GUI testing is essential for software quality but suffers from high manual costs. While Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM) agents excel in navigation, they fail to autonomously discover defects due to two core challenges: textitGoal-Oriented Masking, where agents prioritize task completion over reporting anomalies, and textitExecution-Bias Attribution, where system defects are misidentified as agent errors. To address these, we first introduce GUITestBench, the first interactive benchmark for this task, featuring 143 tasks across 26 defects. We then propose GUITester, a multi-agent framework that decouples navigation from verification via two modules: (i) a textitPlanning-Execution Module (PEM) that proactively probes for defects via embedded testing intents, and (ii) a textitHierarchical Reflection Module (HRM) that resolves attribution ambiguity through interaction history analysis. GUITester achieves an F1-score of 48.90% (Pass@3) on GUITestBench, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines (33.35%). Our work demonstrates the feasibility of autonomous exploratory testing and provides a robust foundation for future GUI quality assurance~footnoteOur code is now available in~hrefhttps://github.com/ADaM-BJTU/GUITestBenchhttps://github.com/ADaM-BJTU/GUITestBench.