# Faithful Mobile GUI Agents with Guided Advantage Estimator

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01208 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01208/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 44 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 May 2026.

## 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 44)

- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14476/) (2025)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13372/) (2024)
- [Group Sequence Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18071/) (2025)
- [Aligning Large Multimodal Models with Factually Augmented RLHF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14525/) (2023)
- [CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08914/) (2023)
- [SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10935/) (2024)
- [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)
- [SWE-RL: Advancing LLM Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning on Open Software Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18449/) (2025)
- [GUI-R1 : A Generalist R1-Style Vision-Language Action Model For GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10458/) (2025)
- [ShowUI: One Vision-Language-Action Model for GUI Visual Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17465/) (2024)
- [UI-TARS-2 Technical Report: Advancing GUI Agent with Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02544/) (2025)
- [Multi-Modal Hallucination Control by Visual Information Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14003/) (2024)
- [On the Effects of Data Scale on UI Control Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03679/) (2024)
- [Mobile-Agent-v3: Fundamental Agents for GUI Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15144/) (2025)
- [Don't Hallucinate, Abstain: Identifying LLM Knowledge Gaps via Multi-LLM Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00367/) (2024)
- [Ferret-UI: Grounded Mobile UI Understanding with Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05719/) (2024)
- [UI-R1: Enhancing Efficient Action Prediction of GUI Agents by Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21620/) (2025)
- [Android in the Zoo: Chain-of-Action-Thought for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02713/) (2024)
- [Attacking Vision-Language Computer Agents via Pop-ups](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02391/) (2024)
- [GUI Agents with Foundation Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04890/) (2024)
- [GUI Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13501/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Visual Grounding for GUI Agents via Self-Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12370/) (2025)
- [ARPO:End-to-End Policy Optimization for GUI Agents with Experience Replay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16282/) (2025)
- [GUI-G2: Gaussian Reward Modeling for GUI Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15846/) (2025)
- [Caution for the Environment: Multimodal LLM Agents are Susceptible to Environmental Distractions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02544/) (2024)
- [IHEval: Evaluating Language Models on Following the Instruction Hierarchy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08745/) (2025)
- [PhD: A ChatGPT-Prompted Visual hallucination Evaluation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11116/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Do GUI Agents Know When Not to Act? Enabling Conflict-Aware Termination for Multimodal GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03438/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-language model based graphical user interface (GUI) agents have shown strong interaction capabilities. However, they often behave unfaithfully, relying on memorized shortcuts rather than grounding actions in displayed screen evidence or user instructions. To address this, we propose Faithful-Agent, a faithfulness-first framework that reformulates GUI interaction to prioritize evidence groundedness and internal consistency. Faithful-Agent employs a two-stage pipeline: (i) a faithfulness-oriented SFT stage to instill abstainment behaviors under evidence perturbations; (ii) an RFT stage that further amplifies faithfulness by introducing the guided advantage estimator (GuAE), an anchor-based and variance-adaptive advantage tempering mechanism built upon GRPO. GuAE prevents advantage collapse in low-variance rollout groups under sparse GUI rewards, and with a thought-action consistency reward, Faithful-Agent (Stage II) elevates the Trap SR from 13.88% to 80.21% relative to the baseline, while preserving robust general instruction-following performance.