LLM-Explorer: Towards Efficient and Affordable LLM-based Exploration for Mobile Apps

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Zhao, Shanhui, Wen, Hao, Du, Wenjie, Liang, Cheng, Liu, Yunxin, Ye, Xiaozhou, Ouyang, Ye, Li, Yuanchun
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Zhao, Shanhui
Wen, Hao
Du, Wenjie
Liang, Cheng
Liu, Yunxin
Ye, Xiaozhou
Ouyang, Ye
Li, Yuanchun
author_facet Zhao, Shanhui
Wen, Hao
Du, Wenjie
Liang, Cheng
Liu, Yunxin
Ye, Xiaozhou
Ouyang, Ye
Li, Yuanchun
contents Large language models (LLMs) have opened new opportunities for automated mobile app exploration, an important and challenging problem that used to suffer from the difficulty of generating meaningful UI interactions. However, existing LLM-based exploration approaches rely heavily on LLMs to generate actions in almost every step, leading to a huge cost of token fees and computational resources. We argue that such extensive usage of LLMs is neither necessary nor effective, since many actions during exploration do not require, or may even be biased by the abilities of LLMs. Further, based on the insight that a precise and compact knowledge plays the central role for effective exploration, we introduce LLM-Explorer, a new exploration agent designed for efficiency and affordability. LLM-Explorer uses LLMs primarily for maintaining the knowledge instead of generating actions, and knowledge is used to guide action generation in a LLM-less manner. Based on a comparison with 5 strong baselines on 20 typical apps, LLM-Explorer was able to achieve the fastest and highest coverage among all automated app explorers, with over 148x lower cost than the state-of-the-art LLM-based approach.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_10593
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLM-Explorer: Towards Efficient and Affordable LLM-based Exploration for Mobile Apps
Zhao, Shanhui
Wen, Hao
Du, Wenjie
Liang, Cheng
Liu, Yunxin
Ye, Xiaozhou
Ouyang, Ye
Li, Yuanchun
Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Large language models (LLMs) have opened new opportunities for automated mobile app exploration, an important and challenging problem that used to suffer from the difficulty of generating meaningful UI interactions. However, existing LLM-based exploration approaches rely heavily on LLMs to generate actions in almost every step, leading to a huge cost of token fees and computational resources. We argue that such extensive usage of LLMs is neither necessary nor effective, since many actions during exploration do not require, or may even be biased by the abilities of LLMs. Further, based on the insight that a precise and compact knowledge plays the central role for effective exploration, we introduce LLM-Explorer, a new exploration agent designed for efficiency and affordability. LLM-Explorer uses LLMs primarily for maintaining the knowledge instead of generating actions, and knowledge is used to guide action generation in a LLM-less manner. Based on a comparison with 5 strong baselines on 20 typical apps, LLM-Explorer was able to achieve the fastest and highest coverage among all automated app explorers, with over 148x lower cost than the state-of-the-art LLM-based approach.
title LLM-Explorer: Towards Efficient and Affordable LLM-based Exploration for Mobile Apps
topic Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10593