OS-Sentinel: Towards Safety-Enhanced Mobile GUI Agents via Hybrid
  Validation in Realistic Workflows
Authors: name: Qiushi Sun; name: Mukai Li; name: Zhoumianze Liu; name: Zhihui Xie; name: Fangzhi Xu; name: Zhangyue Yin; name: Kanzhi Cheng; name: Zehao Li; name: Zichen Ding; name: Qi Liu; name: Zhiyong Wu; name: Zhuosheng Zhang; name: Ben Kao; name: Lingpeng Kong
Published: 2025-10-28 13:22:39

Abstract: Computer-using agents powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have
demonstrated human-like capabilities in operating digital environments like
mobile platforms. While these agents hold great promise for advancing digital
automation, their potential for unsafe operations, such as system compromise
and privacy leakage, is raising significant concerns. Detecting these safety
concerns across the vast and complex operational space of mobile environments
presents a formidable challenge that remains critically underexplored. To
establish a foundation for mobile agent safety research, we introduce
MobileRisk-Live, a dynamic sandbox environment accompanied by a safety
detection benchmark comprising realistic trajectories with fine-grained
annotations. Built upon this, we propose OS-Sentinel, a novel hybrid safety
detection framework that synergistically combines a Formal Verifier for
detecting explicit system-level violations with a VLM-based Contextual Judge
for assessing contextual risks and agent actions. Experiments show that
OS-Sentinel achieves 10%-30% improvements over existing approaches across
multiple metrics. Further analysis provides critical insights that foster the
development of safer and more reliable autonomous mobile agents.