Towards Trustworthy GUI Agents: A Survey

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Shi, Yucheng, Yu, Wenhao, Huang, Jingyuan, Yao, Wenlin, Chen, Wenhu, Liu, Ninghao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866910030608990208
author Shi, Yucheng
Yu, Wenhao
Huang, Jingyuan
Yao, Wenlin
Chen, Wenhu
Liu, Ninghao
author_facet Shi, Yucheng
Yu, Wenhao
Huang, Jingyuan
Yao, Wenlin
Chen, Wenhu
Liu, Ninghao
contents Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents extend large language models from text generation to action execution in real-world digital environments. Unlike conversational systems, GUI agents perform irreversible operations such as submitting forms, granting permissions, or deleting data, making trustworthiness a core requirement. This survey identifies the execution gap as a key challenge in building trustworthy GUI agents: the misalignment between perception, reasoning, and interaction in dynamic, partially observable interfaces. We introduce a workflow-aligned taxonomy that decomposes trust into Perception Trust, Reasoning Trust, and Interaction Trust, showing how failures propagate across agent pipelines and compound through action/observation loops. We systematically review benign failure modes and adversarial attacks at each stage, together with corresponding defense mechanisms tailored to GUI settings. We further analyze evaluation practices and argue that task completion alone is insufficient for trust assessment. We highlight emerging trust-aware metrics and benchmarks that capture error cascades and the security/utility trade-off, and outline open challenges for deploying GUI agents safely and reliably.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_23434
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Trustworthy GUI Agents: A Survey
Shi, Yucheng
Yu, Wenhao
Huang, Jingyuan
Yao, Wenlin
Chen, Wenhu
Liu, Ninghao
Machine Learning
Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents extend large language models from text generation to action execution in real-world digital environments. Unlike conversational systems, GUI agents perform irreversible operations such as submitting forms, granting permissions, or deleting data, making trustworthiness a core requirement. This survey identifies the execution gap as a key challenge in building trustworthy GUI agents: the misalignment between perception, reasoning, and interaction in dynamic, partially observable interfaces. We introduce a workflow-aligned taxonomy that decomposes trust into Perception Trust, Reasoning Trust, and Interaction Trust, showing how failures propagate across agent pipelines and compound through action/observation loops. We systematically review benign failure modes and adversarial attacks at each stage, together with corresponding defense mechanisms tailored to GUI settings. We further analyze evaluation practices and argue that task completion alone is insufficient for trust assessment. We highlight emerging trust-aware metrics and benchmarks that capture error cascades and the security/utility trade-off, and outline open challenges for deploying GUI agents safely and reliably.
title Towards Trustworthy GUI Agents: A Survey
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23434