mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Learning Reliable GUI Agents under Imperfect Priors

arXiv 2609.39547 ↗First posted 30 Sep 2026cs.LGcited by 0

On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → Embodied and 3D vision-language models

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

GUI agents built on large language and vision-language models still struggle on unseen applications and complex multi-step tasks, as completing real GUI tasks depends on app-specific, temporally volatile operational knowledge that is scarce in pretraining corpora. Retrieval-augmented execution offers a natural remedy but faces two coupled bottlenecks: knowledge at scale is hard to acquire, and self-collected priors inevitably drift from the live environment due to version updates, promotions, ads, A/B tests, and personalization. We therefore argue that GUI agents should not pursue perfect knowledge but learn to act correctly under imperfect priors, and propose our framework that couples knowledge acquisition with noise-robust utilization: a structured exploration strategy traverses interactive elements, builds a UI state-transition graph, and synthesizes (task, trajectory) pairs via a VLM without human annotation; a noise-aware training strategy, grounded in a taxonomy of real GUI drift patterns, injects five types of realistic errors into self-explored trajectories to teach the agent to assess prior reliability before acting. Experiments on physical devices and online emulator benchmarks show that our method discovers more unique screens, covers more benchmark tasks, and more effectively rejects erroneous priors while leveraging correct ones, with accuracy gains that transfer across datasets.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Embodied and 3D vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 35 of its 40 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2026.

Builds on

35 of 40 references.

Closest ancestors · 3

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024OS-ATLAS: A Foundation Action Model for Generalist GUI Agents30 Oct
  2. 2024Ferret-UI: Grounded Mobile UI Understanding with Multimodal LLMs8 Apr
  3. 2023CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agents14 Dec

Other references · 32

  1. 2020Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Taskscited by 9,160
  2. 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,534
  3. 2023Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflectioncited by 1,800
  4. 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Webcited by 1,210
  5. 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,134
  6. 2025UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agentscited by 584
  7. 2024SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agentscited by 553
  8. 2024AndroidWorld: A Dynamic Benchmarking Environment for Autonomous Agentscited by 450
  9. 2023AppAgent: Multimodal Agents as Smartphone Userscited by 407
  10. 2023Making Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Robust to Irrelevant Contextcited by 364
  11. 2023Android in the Wild: A Large-Scale Dataset for Android Device Controlcited by 314
  12. 2024Mobile-Agent: Autonomous Multi-Modal Mobile Device Agent with Visual Perceptioncited by 283
20 more
  1. 2024The Power of Noise: Redefining Retrieval for RAG Systemscited by 275
  2. 2023AutoDroid: LLM-powered Task Automation in Androidcited by 178
  3. 2021Screen2Words: Automatic Mobile UI Summarization with Multimodal Learningcited by 119
  4. 2024AndroidLab: Training and Systematic Benchmarking of Android Autonomous Agentscited by 105
  5. 2024InstructRAG: Instructing Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Self-Synthesized Rationalescited by 100
  6. 2020Widget Captioning: Generating Natural Language Description for Mobile User Interface Elementscited by 94
  7. 2024Enhancing Noise Robustness of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models with Adaptive Adversarial Trainingcited by 88
  8. 2025MAI-UI Technical Report: Real-World Centric Foundation GUI Agentscited by 88
  9. 2026Mobile-Agent-v3.5: Multi-platform Fundamental GUI Agentscited by 72
  10. 2025MobileWorld: Benchmarking Autonomous Mobile Agents in Agent-User Interactive and MCP-Augmented Environmentscited by 69
  11. 2023Explore, Select, Derive, and Recall: Augmenting LLM with Human-like Memory for Mobile Task Automationcited by 57
  12. 2025AgentCPM-GUI: Building Mobile-Use Agents with Reinforcement Fine-Tuningcited by 44
  13. 2025Step-GUI Technical Reportcited by 38
  14. 2024MobA: Multifaceted Memory-Enhanced Adaptive Planning for Efficient Mobile Task Automationcited by 14
  15. 2026OmegaUse: Building a General-Purpose GUI Agent for Autonomous Task Executioncited by 13
  16. 2025MapAgent: Trajectory-Constructed Memory-Augmented Planning for Mobile Task Automationcited by 10
  17. 2025LLM-Explorer: Towards Efficient and Affordable LLM-based Exploration for Mobile Appscited by 8
  18. 2025TransBench: Breaking Barriers for Transferable Graphical User Interface Agents in Dynamic Digital Environmentscited by 8
  19. 2025Mobile-Agent-RAG: Driving Smart Multi-Agent Coordination with Contextual Knowledge Empowerment for Long-Horizon Mobile Automationcited by 5
  20. 2026SecAgent: Efficient Mobile GUI Agent with Semantic Contextcited by 4

Built on by

Not cited yet.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026HATS: Hardness-Aware Trajectory Synthesis for GUI Agents
  2. 2025UI-AGILE: Advancing GUI Agents with Effective Reinforcement Learning and Precise Inference-Time Grounding
  3. 2025NaturalGAIA: A Verifiable Benchmark and Hierarchical Framework for Long-Horizon GUI Tasks
  4. 2026MAGNET: Towards Adaptive GUI Agents with Memory-Driven Knowledge Evolution
  5. 2026GUI-CC: Benchmarking Contextual Consistency of GUI World Models as Agent Environments
  6. 2025Mirage-1: Augmenting and Updating GUI Agent with Hierarchical Multimodal Skills
  7. 2025GUI Knowledge Bench: Revealing the Knowledge Gap of VLMs in GUI Tasks
  8. 2026Do GUI Agents Know When Not to Act? Enabling Conflict-Aware Termination for Multimodal GUI Agents