# PastForward: Faster On-Device GUI Agents via Computational Experience Reuse

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.32166 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32166/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in GUI and mobile agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 22 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 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, 22 of 22)

- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07972/) (2024)
- [SGLang: Efficient Execution of Structured Language Model Programs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07104/) (2023)
- [AndroidWorld: A Dynamic Benchmarking Environment for Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14573/) (2024)
- [AppAgent: Multimodal Agents as Smartphone Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13771/) (2023)
- [ShowUI: One Vision-Language-Action Model for GUI Visual Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17465/) (2024)
- [Mobile-Agent-v3: Fundamental Agents for GUI Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15144/) (2025)
- [AutoDroid: LLM-powered Task Automation in Android](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15272/) (2023)
- [MAI-UI Technical Report: Real-World Centric Foundation GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22047/) (2025)
- [Mobile-Agent-v3.5: Multi-platform Fundamental GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16855/) (2026)
- [Explore, Select, Derive, and Recall: Augmenting LLM with Human-like Memory for Mobile Task Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03003/) (2023)
- [TinyAgent: Function Calling at the Edge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00608/) (2024)
- [BlueLM-V-3B: Algorithm and System Co-Design for Multimodal Large Language Models on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10640/) (2024)
- [VeriSafe Agent: Safeguarding Mobile GUI Agent via Logic-based Action Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18492/) (2025)
- [FingerTip 20K: A Benchmark for Proactive and Personalized Mobile LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21071/) (2025)
- [Characterizing and Forecasting User Engagement with In-app Action Graph: A Case Study of Snapchat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00355/) (2019)
- [AgentProg: Empowering Long-Horizon GUI Agents with Program-Guided Context Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10371/) (2025)
- [LLM-Explorer: Towards Efficient and Affordable LLM-based Exploration for Mobile Apps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10593/) (2025)
- [Darwinian Memory: A Training-Free Self-Regulating Memory System for GUI Agent Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22528/) (2026)
- [Agent-X: Full Pipeline Acceleration of On-device AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10380/) (2026)
- [AutoRPA: Efficient GUI Automation through LLM-Driven Code Synthesis from Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21082/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Running GUI agents on edge devices can keep sensitive screens and interaction histories local, but the computational cost of inference at every action step makes deployment challenging. Existing GUI agent systems either perform full vision-language model (VLM) inference at each action step or reuse coarse-grained knowledge matched to prior tasks. However, dynamic mobile environments and user tasks make it difficult to fully utilize prior task executions without additional fine-tuning or task-specific offline exploration. To address this challenge, we present PastForward, a system that accelerates GUI agents through validated, fine-grained reuse of computational experience accumulated during ordinary task execution. During decoding, PastForward retrieves prior output sequences as device-adaptive multi-token proposals and verifies them in a single VLM forward pass. Across action steps, it uses prior GUI transitions to begin next-step inference while the device executes the current action, retains the early computation only when the predicted screen matches the observed screen, and carries reusable KV states forward. We evaluate PastForward on AndroidWorld workloads derived from real mobile usage patterns using multiple VLM backbones across server and edge platforms. On device, PastForward achieves action-step latency speedups of 1.63-2.36× while maintaining task success rates.