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.
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.
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.
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.