Agent-Initiated Interaction in Phone UI Automation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kahlon, Noam, Rom, Guy, Efros, Anatoly, Galgani, Filippo, Berkovitch, Omri, Caduri, Sapir, Bishop, William E., Riva, Oriana, Dagan, Ido
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866913769074982912
author Kahlon, Noam
Rom, Guy
Efros, Anatoly
Galgani, Filippo
Berkovitch, Omri
Caduri, Sapir
Bishop, William E.
Riva, Oriana
Dagan, Ido
author_facet Kahlon, Noam
Rom, Guy
Efros, Anatoly
Galgani, Filippo
Berkovitch, Omri
Caduri, Sapir
Bishop, William E.
Riva, Oriana
Dagan, Ido
contents Phone automation agents aim to autonomously perform a given natural-language user request, such as scheduling appointments or booking a hotel. While much research effort has been devoted to screen understanding and action planning, complex tasks often necessitate user interaction for successful completion. Aligning the agent with the user's expectations is crucial for building trust and enabling personalized experiences. This requires the agent to proactively engage the user when necessary, avoiding actions that violate their preferences while refraining from unnecessary questions where a default action is expected. We argue that such subtle agent-initiated interaction with the user deserves focused research attention. To promote such research, this paper introduces a task formulation for detecting the need for user interaction and generating appropriate messages. We thoroughly define the task, including aspects like interaction timing and the scope of the agent's autonomy. Using this definition, we derived annotation guidelines and created AndroidInteraction, a diverse dataset for the task, leveraging an existing UI automation dataset. We tested several text-based and multimodal baseline models for the task, finding that it is very challenging for current LLMs. We suggest that our task formulation, dataset, baseline models and analysis will be valuable for future UI automation research, specifically in addressing this crucial yet often overlooked aspect of agent-initiated interaction. This work provides a needed foundation to allow personalized agents to properly engage the user when needed, within the context of phone UI automation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_19537
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Agent-Initiated Interaction in Phone UI Automation
Kahlon, Noam
Rom, Guy
Efros, Anatoly
Galgani, Filippo
Berkovitch, Omri
Caduri, Sapir
Bishop, William E.
Riva, Oriana
Dagan, Ido
Human-Computer Interaction
Phone automation agents aim to autonomously perform a given natural-language user request, such as scheduling appointments or booking a hotel. While much research effort has been devoted to screen understanding and action planning, complex tasks often necessitate user interaction for successful completion. Aligning the agent with the user's expectations is crucial for building trust and enabling personalized experiences. This requires the agent to proactively engage the user when necessary, avoiding actions that violate their preferences while refraining from unnecessary questions where a default action is expected. We argue that such subtle agent-initiated interaction with the user deserves focused research attention. To promote such research, this paper introduces a task formulation for detecting the need for user interaction and generating appropriate messages. We thoroughly define the task, including aspects like interaction timing and the scope of the agent's autonomy. Using this definition, we derived annotation guidelines and created AndroidInteraction, a diverse dataset for the task, leveraging an existing UI automation dataset. We tested several text-based and multimodal baseline models for the task, finding that it is very challenging for current LLMs. We suggest that our task formulation, dataset, baseline models and analysis will be valuable for future UI automation research, specifically in addressing this crucial yet often overlooked aspect of agent-initiated interaction. This work provides a needed foundation to allow personalized agents to properly engage the user when needed, within the context of phone UI automation.
title Agent-Initiated Interaction in Phone UI Automation
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19537