mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Test-Time Self-Evolving GUI Visual Grounding via Reflection-Guided On-Policy Self-Distillation

arXiv 2608.11191 ↗First posted 11 Aug 2026cs.CV cs.AI cs.CLcited by 2

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

also in 2 more
Abstract (arXiv)

GUI Visual Grounding is a fundamental capability for GUI agents. Existing models typically freeze their parameters after deployment, limiting their ability to adapt to unseen interfaces. Although recent methods attempt to adapt models via test-time reinforcement learning, they cannot reflect upon failed exploration. To overcome this, we propose a Test-Time Self-Evolving framework that enables models to improve after deployment without human-annotated ground truth. It constructs a closed-loop of Exploration, Evaluation, Reflection, and Internalization. Specifically, the agent first explores unseen interfaces by predicting grounding coordinates for given instructions. To evaluate these explorations, we introduce an MLLM-based Reflector to assess the generated results and provide the corresponding reasoning reflections. To internalize reflection knowledge into the model weights, we propose Reflection-Guided On-Policy Self-Distillation, which translates high-level reasoning into dense token-level supervision via a conditioned self-teacher. Furthermore, we design a Contrastive Calibration method to prevent incorrect auto-regressive prefixes from corrupting the supervisory signals during failed explorations. Extensive experiments across six benchmarks demonstrate our framework's effectiveness, achieving an average accuracy improvement of 7.4% over the base model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to successfully exploit on-policy self-distillation for test-time adaptation in GUI visual grounding. By filling the gap in post-deployment adaptation, our framework completes the self-evolving capability of GUI agents. The code will be released.

Key facts. Cited by 2 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 25 of its 28 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Aug 2026.

Builds on

25 of 28 references.

Closest ancestors · 15

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Learn where to Click from Yourself: On-Policy Self-Distillation for GUI Grounding1 May
  2. 2025Grounding Computer Use Agents on Human Demonstrations10 Nov
  3. 2025Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for GUI Grounding via Region Consistency7 Aug
  4. 2025MMBench-GUI: Hierarchical Multi-Platform Evaluation Framework for GUI Agents25 Jul
  5. 2025GUI-Actor: Coordinate-Free Visual Grounding for GUI Agents3 Jun
  6. 2025GUI-G1: Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training for Visual Grounding in GUI Agents21 May
  7. 2025Scaling Computer-Use Grounding via User Interface Decomposition and Synthesis19 May
  8. 2025Enhancing Visual Grounding for GUI Agents via Self-Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning18 May
  9. 2025Visual Test-time Scaling for GUI Agent Grounding1 May
  10. 2025InfiGUI-R1: Advancing Multimodal GUI Agents from Reactive Actors to Deliberative Reasoners19 Apr
  11. 2025ScreenSpot-Pro: GUI Grounding for Professional High-Resolution Computer Use4 Apr
  12. 2025UI-R1: Enhancing Efficient Action Prediction of GUI Agents by Reinforcement Learning27 Mar
3 more
  1. 2025UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agents21 Jan
  2. 2024Navigating the Digital World as Humans Do: Universal Visual Grounding for GUI Agents7 Oct
  3. 2024SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agents17 Jan

Other references · 10

  1. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
  2. 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,793
  3. 2024ShowUI: One Vision-Language-Action Model for GUI Visual Agentcited by 232
  4. 2026Entropy-Aware On-Policy Distillation of Language Modelscited by 175
  5. 2026Vision-OPD: Learning to See Fine Details for Multimodal LLMs via On-Policy Self-Distillationcited by 77
  6. 2026RLCSD: Reinforcement Learning with Contrastive On-Policy Self-Distillationcited by 45
  7. 2026Video-OPD: Efficient Post-Training of Multimodal Large Language Models for Temporal Video Grounding via On-Policy Distillationcited by 36
  8. 2026OPSDL: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Long-Context Language Modelscited by 30
  9. 2026FocusUI: Efficient UI Grounding via Position-Preserving Visual Token Selectioncited by 10
  10. 2026Zoom to Essence: Trainless GUI Grounding by Inferring upon Interface Elementscited by 5

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Measure Twice, Click Once: Co-evolving Proposer and Visual Critic via Reinforcement Learning for GUI Grounding
  2. 2025UI-Ins: Enhancing GUI Grounding with Multi-Perspective Instruction-as-Reasoning
  3. 2025GUI-Bee: Align GUI Action Grounding to Novel Environments via Autonomous Exploration
  4. 2025GUI-Shift: Enhancing VLM-Based GUI Agents through Self-supervised Reinforcement Learning
  5. 2026GUI-Eyes: Tool-Augmented Perception for Visual Grounding in GUI Agents
  6. 2025GTA1: GUI Test-time Scaling Agent
  7. 2026GUI-GENESIS: Automated Synthesis of Efficient Environments with Verifiable Rewards for GUI Agent Post-Training
  8. 2026EE-MCP: Self-Evolving MCP-GUI Agents via Automated Environment Generation and Experience Learning