# Learning from Reliable Negatives: Confidence-Anchored Test-Time Adaptation for GUI Grounding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.15307 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.15307/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 58 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13854/) (2023)
- [CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08914/) (2023)
- [UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12326/) (2025)
- [SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10935/) (2024)
- [VLM-R1: A Stable and Generalizable R1-style Large Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07615/) (2025)
- [AndroidWorld: A Dynamic Benchmarking Environment for Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14573/) (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)
- [Mobile-Agent: Autonomous Multi-Modal Mobile Device Agent with Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16158/) (2024)
- [Aguvis: Unified Pure Vision Agents for Autonomous GUI Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04454/) (2024)
- [TTRL: Test-Time Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16084/) (2025)
- [ScreenSpot-Pro: GUI Grounding for Professional High-Resolution Computer Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07981/) (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-R1: Enhancing Efficient Action Prediction of GUI Agents by Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21620/) (2025)
- [OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19723/) (2024)
- [The Surprising Effectiveness of Negative Reinforcement in LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01347/) (2025)
- [NLNL: Negative Learning for Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07387/) (2019)
- [Aria-UI: Visual Grounding for GUI Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16256/) (2024)
- [InfiGUI-R1: Advancing Multimodal GUI Agents from Reactive Actors to Deliberative Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14239/) (2025)
- [Scaling Computer-Use Grounding via User Interface Decomposition and Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13227/) (2025)
- [GTA1: GUI Test-time Scaling Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05791/) (2025)
- [GUI-Actor: Coordinate-Free Visual Grounding for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03143/) (2025)
- [UI-Venus Technical Report: Building High-performance UI Agents with RFT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10833/) (2025)
- [MAI-UI Technical Report: Real-World Centric Foundation GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22047/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding is essential for autonomous agents to map natural language instructions to precise screen coordinates. However, existing supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning methods are constrained by the high cost of annotation, creating a scalability bottleneck. In this paper, we introduce a label-free test-time training paradigm driven by two key insights: (1) confidence patterns in coordinate tokens are a better indicator than full-sequence confidence, and (2) in sparse GUI coordinate spaces, negative samples offer more reliable learning signals than potentially noisy positive ones. We first propose Confidence-Anchored Learning (CAL), which utilizes coordinate-token confidence to filter pseudo-labels and assign distance-based binary rewards. Building on this, we develop Confidence-Anchored Negative Learning (CANL), which exclusively optimizes the model using negative samples to bypass the risks of incorrect positive samples. Experimental results demonstrate that CANL-7B achieves 92.1% on ScreenSpot-V2. On more challenging ScreenSpot-Pro, CANL-7B reaches 33.8%, an 8.9% absolute improvement over the base model. Our findings establish coordinate-token confidence as a powerful alternative to manual annotations for scalable GUI agent development.