Researcher profile

Huawen Shen

Huawen Shen contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

3 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

DRS-GUI: Dynamic Region Search for Training-Free GUI Grounding

GUI agents powered by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capability in understanding and executing user instructions. However, accurately grounding instruction-relevant elements from high-resolution screenshots cluttered with irrelevant UI components remains challenging for existing approaches. Inspired by how humans dynamically adjust their perceptual scope to locate task-related regions on complex screens, we propose DRS-GUI, a training-free dynamic region search framework for GUI grounding that can be seamlessly integrated into existing MLLMs. DRS-GUI introduces a lightweight UI Perceptor that performs three human-like perceptual actions (Focus, Shift, and Scatter) to progressively explore the interface and generate region proposals. To dynamically schedule these actions, we further design an Action Planner based on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). A region quality reward is employed to evaluate and select the highly instruction-relevant region, efficiently pruning redundant UI elements. Experiments demonstrate that DRS-GUI yields a 14\% improvement on ScreenSpot-Pro for general and GUI-specific MLLMs (Qwen2.5-VL-7B and UGround-V1-7B), significantly enhancing grounding performance and generalization.

preprint2026arXiv

Learn where to Click from Yourself: On-Policy Self-Distillation for GUI Grounding

Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding maps natural language instructions to the visual coordinates of target elements and serves as a core capability for autonomous GUI agents. Recent reinforcement learning methods (e.g., GRPO) have achieved strong performance, but they rely on expensive multiple rollouts and suffer from sparse signals on hard samples. These limitations make on-policy self-distillation (OPSD), which provides dense token-level supervision from a single rollout, a promising alternative. However, its applicability to GUI grounding remains unexplored. In this paper, we present GUI-SD, the first OPSD framework tailored for GUI grounding. First, it constructs a visually enriched privileged context for the teacher using a target bounding box and a Gaussian soft mask, providing informative guidance without leaking exact coordinates. Second, it employs entropy-guided distillation, which adaptively weights tokens based on digit significance and teacher confidence, concentrating optimization on the most impactful and reliable positions. Extensive experiments on six representative GUI grounding benchmarks show that GUI-SD consistently outperforms GRPO-based methods and naive OPSD in both accuracy and training efficiency. Code and training data are available at https://zhangyan-ucas.github.io/GUI-SD/.

preprint2026arXiv

Safe, or Simply Incapable? Rethinking Safety Evaluation for Phone-Use Agents

When a phone-use agent avoids harm, does that show safety, or simply inability to act? Existing evaluations often cannot tell. A harmful outcome may be avoided because the agent recognized the risk and chose the safe action, or because it failed to understand the screen or execute any relevant action at all. These cases have different causes and call for different fixes, yet current benchmarks often merge them under task success, refusal, or final harmful outcome. We address this problem with PhoneSafety, a benchmark of 700 safety-critical moments drawn from real phone interactions across more than 130 apps. Each instance isolates the next decision at a risky moment and asks a simple question: does the model take the safe action, take the unsafe action, or fail to do anything useful? We evaluate eight representative phone-use agents under this framework. Our results reveal two main patterns. First, stronger general phone-use ability does not reliably imply safer choices at risky moments. Models that perform better on ordinary app tasks are not always the ones that behave more safely when the next action matters. Second, failures to do anything useful behave like a capability signal rather than a safety signal: they are concentrated in more visually and operationally demanding settings and remain stable when the evaluation protocol changes. Across models, failures split into two recurring patterns: unsafe choices in settings where the model can act but chooses wrongly, and inability to act in more visually and operationally demanding screens. Overall, a harmless outcome is not enough to count as evidence of safety. Evaluating phone-use agents requires separating unsafe judgment from inability to act.