arXiv2026GUI agentsMultimodal LLMsComputer use
VLAA-GUI: Knowing When to Stop, Recover, and Search, A Modular Framework for GUI Automation
arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.21375, 2026 · * equal contribution
GUI agents fail in two predictable ways: they declare success too early, and they repeat the same failing action. VLAA-GUI adds a Completeness Verifier (when to stop), a Loop Breaker (when to recover), and an on-demand Search Agent (when to look things up).
- 77.5%OSWorld
- 61.0%WindowsAgentArena
- 3 / 5backbones above human (72.4%) on OSWorld
Autonomous GUI agents face two fundamental challenges: early stopping, where agents prematurely declare success without verifiable evidence, and repetitive loops, where agents cycle through the same failing actions without recovery. We present VLAA-GUI, a modular GUI agentic framework built around three integrated components that guide the system on when to Stop, Recover, and Search. First, a mandatory Completeness Verifier enforces UI-observable success criteria and verification at every finish step, with an agent-level verifier that cross-examines completion claims with decision rules, rejecting those lacking direct visual evidence. Second, a mandatory Loop Breaker provides multi-tier filtering: switching interaction mode after repeated failures, forcing strategy changes after persistent screen-state recurrence, and binding reflection signals to strategy shifts. Third, an on-demand Search Agent searches online for unfamiliar workflows by directly querying a capable LLM with search ability, returning results as plain text. We additionally integrate a Coding Agent for code-intensive actions and a Grounding Agent for precise action grounding, both invoked on demand when required. We evaluate VLAA-GUI across five top-tier backbones, including Opus 4.5, 4.6 and Gemini 3.1 Pro, on two benchmarks with Linux and Windows tasks, achieving top performance on both (77.5% on OSWorld and 61.0% on WindowsAgentArena). Notably, three of the five backbones surpass human performance (72.4%) on OSWorld in a single pass. Ablation studies show that all three proposed components consistently improve a strong backbone, while a weaker backbone benefits more from these tools when the step budget is sufficient. Further analysis also shows that the Loop Breaker nearly halves wasted steps for loop-prone models.
@article{han2026vlaagui,
title = {{VLAA-GUI}: Knowing When to Stop, Recover, and Search, A Modular Framework for {GUI} Automation},
author = {Han, Qijun and Tu, Haoqin and Wang, Zijun and Dai, Haoyue and Zhou, Yiyang and Lau, Nancy and Cardenas, Alvaro A. and Xu, Yuhui and Xu, Ran and Xiong, Caiming and Zheng, Zeyu and Yao, Huaxiu and Zhou, Yuyin and Xie, Cihang},
journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.21375},
year = {2026}
}