MANA: Towards Efficient Mobile Ad Detection via Multimodal Agentic UI Navigation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Zhao, Yizhe, Fu, Yongjian, Feng, Zihao, Pan, Hao, Deng, Yongheng, Zhang, Yaoxue, Ren, Ju
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Zhao, Yizhe
Fu, Yongjian
Feng, Zihao
Pan, Hao
Deng, Yongheng
Zhang, Yaoxue
Ren, Ju
author_facet Zhao, Yizhe
Fu, Yongjian
Feng, Zihao
Pan, Hao
Deng, Yongheng
Zhang, Yaoxue
Ren, Ju
contents Mobile advertising dominates app monetization but introduces risks ranging from intrusive user experience to malware delivery. Existing detection methods rely either on static analysis, which misses runtime behaviors, or on heuristic UI exploration, which struggles with sparse and obfuscated ads. In this paper, we present MANA, the first agentic multimodal reasoning framework for mobile ad detection. MANA integrates static, visual, temporal, and experiential signals into a reasoning-guided navigation strategy that determines not only how to traverse interfaces but also where to focus, enabling efficient and robust exploration. We implement and evaluate MANA on commercial smartphones over 200 apps, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy and efficiency. Compared to baselines, it improves detection accuracy by 30.5%-56.3% and reduces exploration steps by 29.7%-63.3%. Case studies further demonstrate its ability to uncover obfuscated and malicious ads, underscoring its practicality for mobile ad auditing and its potential for broader runtime UI analysis (e.g., permission abuse). Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/MANA-2026/MANA.
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publishDate 2026
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spellingShingle MANA: Towards Efficient Mobile Ad Detection via Multimodal Agentic UI Navigation
Zhao, Yizhe
Fu, Yongjian
Feng, Zihao
Pan, Hao
Deng, Yongheng
Zhang, Yaoxue
Ren, Ju
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Mobile advertising dominates app monetization but introduces risks ranging from intrusive user experience to malware delivery. Existing detection methods rely either on static analysis, which misses runtime behaviors, or on heuristic UI exploration, which struggles with sparse and obfuscated ads. In this paper, we present MANA, the first agentic multimodal reasoning framework for mobile ad detection. MANA integrates static, visual, temporal, and experiential signals into a reasoning-guided navigation strategy that determines not only how to traverse interfaces but also where to focus, enabling efficient and robust exploration. We implement and evaluate MANA on commercial smartphones over 200 apps, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy and efficiency. Compared to baselines, it improves detection accuracy by 30.5%-56.3% and reduces exploration steps by 29.7%-63.3%. Case studies further demonstrate its ability to uncover obfuscated and malicious ads, underscoring its practicality for mobile ad auditing and its potential for broader runtime UI analysis (e.g., permission abuse). Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/MANA-2026/MANA.
title MANA: Towards Efficient Mobile Ad Detection via Multimodal Agentic UI Navigation
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20351