TRACE: Trajectory-robust Admission with Evidence Ordering for Efficient GUI Agents
Abstract: GUI agents accumulate high-resolution screenshots as the trajectory unfolds, increasing inference latency and memory usage. Training-free visual token pruning can reduce this cost, but cache reuse introduces a fundamental constraint. Once tokens are discarded, the corresponding visual evidence cannot be recovered without re-encoding. Pruning therefore becomes an \textit{irreversible admission decision} that must remain useful for unknown future targets while preserving coverage of operable regions under tight budgets. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{\method{}}, a training-free framework for \emph{\textbf{T}rajectory-\textbf{r}obust \textbf{A}dmission and \textbf{C}overage-aware \textbf{E}vidence ordering}. Specifically, we combine a query-independent layout-derived interaction prior with instruction relevance and feature novelty to rank visual evidence according to both potential future utility and diversity. Then, we reserve part of the budget for native visual tokens distributed across the screen, repairing missing spatial coverage without breaking the ordering. Together, these mechanisms produce a nested token order, allowing retained visual evidence to shrink monotonically across budgets while remaining reusable throughout the trajectory. Finally, our monotone KV contraction incrementally contracts retired frames into compact session state, avoiding repeated visual encoding or pruning. Extensive experiments across six GUI benchmarks and diverse models verify the effectiveness of our proposed \method{} under tight budgets. The source code will be released.