Explorer: Robust Collection of Interactable GUI Elements

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Chaimalas, Iason, Vyšniauskas, Arnas, Brostow, Gabriel
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866917984251936768
author Chaimalas, Iason
Vyšniauskas, Arnas
Brostow, Gabriel
author_facet Chaimalas, Iason
Vyšniauskas, Arnas
Brostow, Gabriel
contents Automation of existing Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) is important but hard to achieve. Upstream of making the GUI user-accessible or somehow scriptable, even the data-collection to understand the original interface poses significant challenges. For example, large quantities of general UI data seem helpful for training general machine learning (ML) models, but accessibility for each person can hinge on the ML's precision on a specific app. We therefore take the perspective that a given user needs confidence, that the relevant UI elements are being detected correctly throughout one app or digital environment. We mostly assume that the target application is known in advance, so that data collection and ML-training can be personalized for the test-time target domain. The proposed Explorer system focuses on detecting on-screen buttons and text-entry fields, i.e. interactables, where the training process has access to a live version of the application. The live application can run on almost any popular platform except iOS phones, and the collection is especially streamlined for Android phones or for desktop Chrome browsers. Explorer also enables the recording of interactive user sessions, and subsequent mapping of how such sessions overlap and sometimes loop back to similar states. We show how having such a map enables a kind of path planning through the GUI, letting a user issue audio commands to get to their destination. Critically, we are releasing our code for Explorer openly at https://github.com/varnelis/Explorer.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_09352
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Explorer: Robust Collection of Interactable GUI Elements
Chaimalas, Iason
Vyšniauskas, Arnas
Brostow, Gabriel
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Automation of existing Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) is important but hard to achieve. Upstream of making the GUI user-accessible or somehow scriptable, even the data-collection to understand the original interface poses significant challenges. For example, large quantities of general UI data seem helpful for training general machine learning (ML) models, but accessibility for each person can hinge on the ML's precision on a specific app. We therefore take the perspective that a given user needs confidence, that the relevant UI elements are being detected correctly throughout one app or digital environment. We mostly assume that the target application is known in advance, so that data collection and ML-training can be personalized for the test-time target domain. The proposed Explorer system focuses on detecting on-screen buttons and text-entry fields, i.e. interactables, where the training process has access to a live version of the application. The live application can run on almost any popular platform except iOS phones, and the collection is especially streamlined for Android phones or for desktop Chrome browsers. Explorer also enables the recording of interactive user sessions, and subsequent mapping of how such sessions overlap and sometimes loop back to similar states. We show how having such a map enables a kind of path planning through the GUI, letting a user issue audio commands to get to their destination. Critically, we are releasing our code for Explorer openly at https://github.com/varnelis/Explorer.
title Explorer: Robust Collection of Interactable GUI Elements
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09352