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Main Authors: Hu, Zhiyuan, Xiong, Shiyun, Zhang, Yifan, Ng, See-Kiong, Luu, Anh Tuan, An, Bo, Yan, Shuicheng, Hooi, Bryan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16073
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author Hu, Zhiyuan
Xiong, Shiyun
Zhang, Yifan
Ng, See-Kiong
Luu, Anh Tuan
An, Bo
Yan, Shuicheng
Hooi, Bryan
author_facet Hu, Zhiyuan
Xiong, Shiyun
Zhang, Yifan
Ng, See-Kiong
Luu, Anh Tuan
An, Bo
Yan, Shuicheng
Hooi, Bryan
contents Recent advancements in visual language models (VLMs) have notably enhanced their capabilities in handling complex Graphical User Interface (GUI) interaction tasks. Despite these improvements, current frameworks often struggle to generate correct actions in challenging GUI environments. State-of-the-art commercial VLMs are black-boxes, and fine-tuning open-source VLMs for GUI tasks requires significant resources. Additionally, existing trajectory-level evaluation and refinement techniques frequently fall short due to delayed feedback and local optimization issues. To address these challenges, we propose an approach that guides VLM agents with process supervision by a reward model during GUI navigation and control at inference time. This guidance allows the VLM agent to optimize actions at each inference step, thereby improving performance in both static and dynamic environments. In particular, our method demonstrates significant performance gains in three GUI navigation tasks, achieving a 3.4% improvement in single step action accuracy for static environments, along with a around 33% increase in task success rate in one dynamic environment. With further integration of trajectory reflection and retry mechanisms, we also demonstrate even greater enhancement in task success.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_16073
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Guiding VLM Agents with Process Rewards at Inference Time for GUI Navigation
Hu, Zhiyuan
Xiong, Shiyun
Zhang, Yifan
Ng, See-Kiong
Luu, Anh Tuan
An, Bo
Yan, Shuicheng
Hooi, Bryan
Computation and Language
Recent advancements in visual language models (VLMs) have notably enhanced their capabilities in handling complex Graphical User Interface (GUI) interaction tasks. Despite these improvements, current frameworks often struggle to generate correct actions in challenging GUI environments. State-of-the-art commercial VLMs are black-boxes, and fine-tuning open-source VLMs for GUI tasks requires significant resources. Additionally, existing trajectory-level evaluation and refinement techniques frequently fall short due to delayed feedback and local optimization issues. To address these challenges, we propose an approach that guides VLM agents with process supervision by a reward model during GUI navigation and control at inference time. This guidance allows the VLM agent to optimize actions at each inference step, thereby improving performance in both static and dynamic environments. In particular, our method demonstrates significant performance gains in three GUI navigation tasks, achieving a 3.4% improvement in single step action accuracy for static environments, along with a around 33% increase in task success rate in one dynamic environment. With further integration of trajectory reflection and retry mechanisms, we also demonstrate even greater enhancement in task success.
title Guiding VLM Agents with Process Rewards at Inference Time for GUI Navigation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16073