Papers for

robotic process automation teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

GuiFlow speeds up repeated interface interactions by reusing computations

GUIFlow: Temporal Redundancy-Aware Incremental Inference for GUI Agents

Abstract: GUI agents built on vision-language models interact with continuously evolving interfaces, yet conventional inference repeatedly recomputes representations of largely overlapping observations and histories. This mismatch makes multi-step interaction costly, while changes in context, interface content, and action arguments prevent straightforward cache reuse. We introduce GUIFlow, a framework for full-pipeline incremental inference in multi-image GUI interaction. Our central insight is that advancing a decision need not require rebuilding all supporting representations: each interaction step can instead selectively update computational states maintained across the trajectory. To support new decisions as the context evolves, GUIFlow adapts how past computation is reused: historical KV states are position-aligned and injected into the current context; change signals guide selective updates of current-observation states in the vision encoder and language model; and earlier action responses serve as speculative drafts verified by the target model. Together, these mechanisms enable cross-step reuse throughout visual encoding, prefill, and decoding without additional training, a separate draft model, or changes to the model-visible inputs and action interface. Experiments demonstrate up to 3.39x geometric-mean speedup across offline multi-image benchmarks and up to 3.49x in online, closed-loop interaction on OSWorld, while maintaining task performance broadly comparable to the dense baseline.

Mon 26 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Graphical user interface (GUI) agents need to understand many images of a screen as they interact step-by-step, but often these images and contexts barely change, making computation slow and repetitive. The authors present GUIFlow, a way to remember and update only what changes in the screen and past interactions, instead of starting fresh each time. This method reuses past computations smartly across vision and language steps, speeding up interaction without losing accuracy. Their tests show over three times faster performance both in offline tests and real-time interactions.
Open → 2610.34959v1

Gui agents improve themselves by optimizing task control harness

GUI-HARVEST: Self-Improving GUI Agents through Evidence-Driven Harness Evolution

Abstract: The executable harness surrounding a GUI model determines how observations are assembled, actions are executed, and verification, recovery, and termination are controlled. Compared with harness optimization for non-GUI agents, automatically optimizing this harness poses three coupled challenges: reconciling model intent with observed visual effects, diagnosing failures under variable execution outcomes, and identifying recurrent failure patterns across tasks and translating them into reusable runtime changes. We introduce GUI-HARVEST, an automatic harness optimizer that enables self-improving GUI agents with frozen backbone models. First, to ground diagnosis in observed action effects, it aligns model outputs and executed actions with before-and-after screenshots, tying findings to specific interface transitions. Second, to account for execution variability, it treats repeated runs of the same task as a joint evidence unit, using within-task comparisons to locate outcome-relevant behavioral differences. Third, it consolidates verified findings across tasks into recurring failure patterns, maps them to bounded source-code edits with predictions recorded before evaluation, and checks the predicted behavioral effects alongside task performance through repeated execution. Experiments on OSWorld-Verified show consistent held-out gains across six general-purpose open, GUI-specialized open, and proprietary backbone models; Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct gains 12.33 points on the full suite. Frozen-harness transfer improves GPT-5 by 13.87 percentage points on WindowsAgentArena at 50 steps without further optimization. With the same backbone and initial harness, GUI-HARVEST outperforms Self-Harness and Meta-Harness, suggesting that GUI-specific diagnosis and validation help harness improvements generalize to unseen tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/GaryYang12345/GUI-HARVEST.

Thu 1 OctMachine LearningArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Automated agents that interact with computer interfaces sometimes fail because the way their tasks are set up doesn’t perfectly match what they see on the screen or how the interface behaves. The authors present GUI-HARVEST, a system that helps these agents fix themselves by analyzing screenshots before and after actions, spotting where things go wrong repeatedly, and making practical changes to how tasks are controlled. This approach lets agents get better at completing tasks without changing the underlying AI model. Tests showed it improved performance across various AI models and task types.
Open → 2610.00948v1

Tactile simulators gain texture detail for better robot touch sensing

Norm2Tex: Augmenting Visuo-Tactile Simulations with Texture

Abstract: Large-scale datasets are essential for training generalist robot control policies. Collecting real-world tactile data is costly and time-consuming, motivating the use of tactile simulations. However, current tactile simulators capture only overall contact geometry and miss fine details like texture. This results in a significant domain shift between simulated and real tactile data. To address this gap, we introduce Norm2Tex, a plug-in method that augments simulations of vision-based tactile sensors with high-frequency surface details from normal map textures. By modifying the target object's depth map before a tactile simulator's rendering pipeline, Norm2Tex seamlessly integrates into different tactile simulators. We also evaluate sim-to-real transfer using material classification and a reinforcement learning task. Our results show that Norm2Tex preserves material-dependent tactile information across domains, improving texture recognition and producing material-dependent control behavior in the real world.

Mon 21 SeptRobotics
The gist
Robots learn by touching things, but making realistic touch data is hard and slow. The authors created Norm2Tex, a tool that adds tiny surface textures into touch simulations to make them closer to real life. This helps robots recognize different materials better and make smarter decisions when handling objects. Their tests show that robots trained with Norm2Tex do better at feeling textures and behave more naturally with real objects.
Open → 2609.25398v1

Credit assignment improves large language model agents on long tasks

Granularity-Adaptive Credit Assignment for Long-Horizon LLM Agent Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Reinforcement learning is now the standard way to train large language model agents on long-horizon tasks, where dozens of interdependent actions precede a single sparse reward. Critic-free, group-relative methods such as GRPO suit this regime, but they broadcast one trajectory-level scalar to every step and cannot say which decision drove the outcome. GiGPO recovers a step-level signal by grouping time steps that share an anchor state, yet it merges the step- and episode-level estimates under one fixed weight, spending the same resolution on a pivotal branching decision as on a routine, near-deterministic transition. We argue that the right resolution is state-dependent, and propose GACA, a critic-free estimator whose granularity follows an uncertainty-based criticality proxy. GACA scores every step by the negative log-likelihood its own rollout already records, then blends the two advantages with a per-step weight that grows with that score, so the gradient places more weight on the fine-grained signal at above-average NLL and on the episode-level signal below it. We derive an exact risk decomposition for the implemented mixture and show that sufficiently small modulation improves on fixed mixing under positive directional alignment. A separate conditional result bounds local action-value variation using expected NLL, while an error-projection analysis characterizes when mixing adds value beyond scalar uncertainty reweighting. On ALFWorld and WebShop, GACA improves task success over GRPO and GiGPO at both 1.5B and 7B scales.

Fri 11 SeptMachine Learning
The gist
Training AI agents to do tasks with many steps is hard because it’s unclear which steps lead to success. The authors propose GACA, a method that adjusts how much it focuses on individual steps based on how uncertain the agent is about each step’s outcome. This helps the AI learn better by giving more attention to important decisions and less to routine ones. They show that GACA works better than previous methods on two benchmark tasks involving complex, multi-step problems.
Open → 2609.12424v1