AutoGUI: Scaling GUI Grounding with Automatic Functionality Annotations from LLMs

Authors: Hongxin Li, Jingran Su, Jingfan CHEN, Yuntao Chen, Qing Li, Zhaoxiang Zhang
Primary area: datasets and benchmarks
Keywords: vision language model, large language model, embodied ai, gui understanding, web agent

Abstract:
User interface understanding with vision-language models has received much attention due to its potential for enabling next-generation software automation.
However, existing UI datasets either only provide large-scale context-free element annotations or contextualized functional descriptions for elements at a much smaller scale.
In this work, we propose the **AutoGUI** pipeline for automatically annotating UI elements with detailed functionality descriptions at scale.
Specifically, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to infer element functionality by comparing the UI content changes before and after simulated interactions with specific UI elements. To improve annotation quality, we propose LLM-aided rejection and verification, eliminating invalid and incorrect annotations without human labor.
We construct an **AutoGUI-704k** dataset using the proposed pipeline, featuring multi-resolution, multi-device screenshots, diverse data domains, and detailed functionality annotations that have never been provided by previous datasets.
Human evaluation shows that the **AutoGUI** pipeline achieves annotation correctness comparable to trained human annotators. Extensive experimental results show that our **AutoGUI-704k** dataset remarkably enhances VLM's UI grounding capabilities, exhibits significant scaling effects, and outperforms existing web pre-training data types. We envision AutoGUI as a scalable pipeline for generating massive data to build GUI-oriented VLMs. AutoGUI dataset can be viewed at this anonymous URL: https://huggingface.co/AutoGUI.

Decision: reject
Reviewer scores: 6, 8, 3, 3

Reviews and discussion:
<thread>
creation date:
1729940566044

thread_type:
official_review

<thread_object>
creator: reviewer_vvny

<content>
summary:
The paper introduces AutoGUI, an automatic annotation pipeline designed to scale the grounding of GUI elements by leveraging LLMs' annotation. The authors address the limitations of existing UI datasets, which either lack contextual functional descriptions or are limited in scale. The proposed AutoGUI pipeline automatically collects UI interaction trajectories and uses LLMs to annotate UI elements based on the observed changes in UI content before and after an interaction. For annotation quality, the authors implement LLM-aided rejection and verification mechanisms to filter out invalid or incorrect annotations w.o. human intervention.

strengths:
1. Addressing the data scarcity in UI understanding is highly significant for advancing VLMs in GUI-oriented applications. The ability to automatically generate large-scale, high-quality GUI datasets can accelerate research and development.
2. The AutoGUI-704k provides 704,000 high-quality samples featuring multi-resolution, multi-device screenshots, diverse domains, and detailed functionality annotations. It demonstrate practical applications.
3. Experiments show that models trained on the AutoGUI-704k dataset significantly enhance UI grounding capabilities of VLMs, exhibit scaling effects with increased data size, and outperform models trained on existing (manual) GUI datasets.

weaknesses:
My concerns about this paper mainly revolve around the following three points:

1. **Evaluation on the FuncPred Test Set:** The authors state that the FD metric ("FuncPred is the test split from our collected functionality dataset. This benchmark requires a model to locate the element specified by its functionality description") is essentially a test set drawn from the same format as their training data. It is expected that scaling up their dataset shows effectiveness on this test set. Additionally, further improvement in performance after continued training with the SeeClick data is also reasonable. However, on the **VisualWebBench**, adding the SeeClick data for continued training results in a performance gain that surpasses that achieved with the authors' full dataset:
    - **Data Quality Concerns:** Since the SeeClick data is of the type focusing purely on element grounding (e.g., ScreenSpot), does this partially reflect that the data generated by the proposed method may be of lower quality?
    - **Performance Drop on RefExp:** Moreover, after training, the performance on the RefExp benchmark shows inferior performance for unknown reasons, yielding lower results than training with only SeeClick data. Can the authors provide explanations for this unexpected drop?
2. **Performance Fluctuations with Finetuned Qwen-VL (Tab. 4):** In the main exp, regarding the experiments with finetuned Qwen-VL, it can be observed from Qwen-VL-AutoGUI702k that when finetuned using AutoGUI702k, there is significant performance fluctuation compared to the SeeClick baseline, with a range reaching up to ±20%. Do the authors have further explanations into these substantial performance variations?
3. **Unclear Process in Removing Invalid Samples:**
    - **Insufficient Explanation of Hand-Written Rules:** Authors mentions "hand-written rules" used in the process of removing invalid samples, but these rules are not well explained or detailed.
    - **Lack of Justification for LLM Predictability Scores:** The process of obtaining predictability scores from the LLM outputs lacks sufficient rationale. For instance, why does the scoring range from 0 to 3? More explanation is needed on how this scoring system handles errors, biases, and ambiguous cases.

questions:
My assessment is primarily based on the solidity of the experiments in this paper. I'll try to adjust my assessment after reading the rebuttal.
</content>
</thread_object>

</thread>
<thread>
creation date:
1730213964614

thread_type:
official_review

<thread_object>
creator: reviewer_zwrk

<content>
summary:
This paper proposes a scalable and automatic UI data annotation pipeline that annotates GUI elements with detailed functionality descriptions. It also proposes a series of filters to improve the annotation quality including hand-written rules and LLM-based rejectors and verifiers. The paper shows that the collected annotations achieves high correctness comparable to the trained human annotator, thus reducing the burden of collecting GUI data. The experiments on the collected AutoGUI dataset show its effectiveness in GUI grounding task.

strengths:
Quality & Clarity

The paper points out the shortcomings of current GUI datasets and proposes a data collection pipeline to address them. The collected data is first analyzed for correctness to ensure its quality, and its effectiveness is subsequently demonstrated through experiments. The writing is logically structured and clearly expressed.

weaknesses:
Limited Evidence: The experiments cannot fully demonstrate the effectiveness of AutoGUI data.

1. This paper evaluates AutoGUI data on 6 benchmarks as shown in Table 4. The effectiveness of AutoGUI data can be assessed by comparing the results of *Qwen-VL-AutoGUI702k* and *SeeClick* as they use the same base model. The results on *FuncPred* benchmark are excluded from consideration as *FuncPred* is derived from AutoGUI dataset and shares the same data distribution with it. In the remaining 5 benchmarks, *Qwen-VL-AutoGUI702k* performed worse than *SeeClick* in 3 of them (VWB EG, RefExp, and ScreenSpot). The paper attributes this performance gap to the absence of data from Apple devices and desktop software in the AutoGUI dataset. However, the *ScreenSpot* benchmark has 3 subsets including Web, Desktop and Mobile, and there is a lack of experiments on the Web subset in *ScreenSpot* to support this argument.
In summary, the existing experiments cannot prove the effectiveness of AutoGUI training data.

2. Also the Table 4:
  a) By comparing the results of *Qwen-VL-AutoGUI702k* and *Qwen-VL-AutoGUI702k\**, it is observed that the introduction of SeeClick training data improves the performance of Qwen-VL on all benchmarks;
  b) By comparing the results of *SeeClick* and *Qwen-VL-AutoGUI702k*, it is observed that the introduction of AutoGUI data reduces the performance of Qwen-VL on *RefExp*, and did not significantly improve the performance on *ScreenSpot*.
These 2 results indicate that the role of AutoGUI data is not as significant as SeeClick training data.

3. The paper identifies 3 annotation types in existing UI grounding training data (see Fig.2), but only two of them (Brief Function & HTML Code) are chosen in the experiments (see Table 5). An additional experiment on the Visual appearance and category annotation type would provide a more complete demonstration.

Limited Significance
1. This paper mentions that the ultimate goal of the research is to enable next-generation software automation. However, the work presented here focuses solely on the GUI grounding task, lacking exploration of practical application scenarios.
2. The experimental results indicate that the proposed AutoGUI dataset has not led to substantial advancements in GUI grounding task compared to previous work. (As shown in Table 4, apart from the self-built FuncPred benchmark, this study shows improvement only on *VWB EG* and *ScreenSpot* with minimal gains compared to the state-of-the-art.)

questions:
See Weaknesses.
</content>
</thread_object>

</thread>
<thread>
creation date:
1730705543383

thread_type:
official_review

<thread_object>
creator: reviewer_puox

<content>
summary:
This paper develops a new dataset creation pipeline for collecting Graphical User Interface (GUI) element functionality annotations, which they name AutoGUI. It is focused on obtaining high quality annotations of UI interactions in terms functionality descriptions of the different elements in the UI. Ultimately, they focus on obtaining high-quality tuples of (UI Screenshot, UI Element, Functionality). The pipeline first collects UI trajectories by simulating user interactions when interacting with the elements of the UI. Then, each pair of interactions is analyzed by an LLM to identify its functionality (by observing differences between the UI elements and accessibility tree before and after the interaction). They propose a rejection based LLM filtering to discard unsatisfactory functionality annotations. The pipeline mainly focuses on processing websites or Android UI samples. Using the described pipeline, authors use it to collect the AutoGUI-704k dataset. Finally, they finetune a number of VLM baselines on the proposed dataset to show how they improve in the UI grounding and reasoning tasks.

strengths:
- The paper is well written and easy to read.
- The figures presented in the paper are useful for helping understand the presented pipeline with real examples.
- The AutoGUI pipeline offers good advantages over most of its competitors (as shown in Table 1), specially for 1) its scalability and automation (removing the need for costly human annotation), 2) contextualized functionality annotations, 3) dataset size, and 4) coverage of both web and android
- The analysis on data quality comparing different ablations of the method with human annotations helps strengthen the contribution of AutoGUI.
- Sufficient and relevant benchmarks are selected for evaluating the finetuned VLMs in UI grounding tasks.
- Results show that the proposed dataset helps improving GUI grounding performance.

weaknesses:
- The dataset would enjoy more advantages if it contained more platforms other than websites and Android UI. For instance, extending it to other operating systems, and new UI applications.
- The number of baselines appears quite limited. I would like to see the performance of state-of-the-art VLMs (boths open and closed source). Results from closed GPT4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, or Gemini would help in comparing methods on the presented benchmarks. Similarly, there are a number of powerful open-source models like Llama3.2 [1], MolMo [2], or larger versions of Qwen2VL, like its 70B variant.
- Authors could have performed more fine tuning experiments. Only QwenVL and Slime models have been finetuned. Finetuning more models would help strengthen the contribution of this dataset. For instance, they provide results on Llava, which they could also finetune. 
- We can't see the benefits of the proposed dataset in comparison with other datasets in terms of performance.

[1] https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-3-2-connect-2024-vision-edge-mobile-devices/
[2] Deitke, Matt, et al. "Molmo and pixmo: Open weights and open data for state-of-the-art multimodal models." arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.17146 (2024).

questions:
- Is it easy to scale AutoGUI to new platforms such as IOS, and computer OS UIs?
- Is it easy to scale AutoGUI to multiple languages?
- Have the authors analyzed the overlap between train and test data to avoid any contamination?
- How does the proposed dataset compare with the other datasets of Table 1 in terms of performance (e.g. benchmark evaluations in Table 4). Are results substantially better in comparison to the same models finetuned on other datasets.
- How does it affect the resolution of the input image when solving this task for VLMs?
</content>
</thread_object>

</thread>
<thread>
creation date:
1730880606302

thread_type:
official_review

<thread_object>
creator: reviewer_dsda

<content>
summary:
This paper presents the AutoGUI pipeline for auto-annotating UI element functionality using LLMs, reducing manual work by identifying functions through simulated interaction data. The AutoGUI-704k dataset, constructed by the proposed pipeline, enhances Vision-Language Models in UI understanding. Results show that the dataset improves VLM grounding accuracy, approaching human performance, with automated rejection and verification effectively reducing errors. Human evaluation further demonstrates that the AutoGUI pipeline achieves annotation correctness comparable to trained human annotators.

strengths:
1．AutoGUI pipeline provides a scalable solution to manual UI annotation by using LLMs for functionality labeling, reducing labor and advancing VLM understanding of UI elements.
2.  The pipeline annotates functionality based on UI dynamics, using LLMs to analyze content changes triggered by interactions. This approach enables functionality labeling without manual intervention, capturing detailed functional nuances.
3. AutoGUI-704k dataset covers Web, Mobile device types and UI contexts, valuable for advancing VLM research. The LLM-aided rejection and verification process ensures data quality, reducing manual correction and enhancing annotation reliability.

weaknesses:
1. The experiments focus on specific test sets and benchmarks but lack an analysis of the finetuned model’s generalization across diverse UI types and applications. This may affect the pipeline’s robustness in handling various UI designs, platforms, and complex interactions in real-world settings.

2. Although there are some human checks, the pipeline relies heavily on LLMs for rejection and verification. This raises concerns about whether LLM-based processes alone can consistently maintain high-quality annotations as the dataset scales.

questions:
See the weaknesses.
</content>
</thread_object>

</thread>
<thread>
creation date:
1732329922700

thread_type:
official_comment

<thread_object>
creator: authors

<content>
title:
Rebuttal by Authors

comment:
The authors would like to thank all reviewers for their appreciation and instructive suggestions!

**Summary**

The authors are encouraged by the following comments:

1. The AutoGUI pipeline reduces the labor and difficulty of GUI functionality annotation (dSda, PuoX).

2. The AutoGUI pipeline ensures annotation reliability and quality (dSda, PuoX, ZWrk, vvNy).

3. The AutoGUI-627k dataset is valuable for advancing VLM research (dSda, vvNy), and offers advantages over most of its competitors (PuoX, vvNy).

4. The paper is well-written and easy to read (PuoX, ZWrk).

5. The figures are useful for understanding the authors' ideas (PuoX).

6. The experiments are comprehensive and sufficient (PuoX).

In our previous response, we addressed concerns raised in the reviews and provided detailed explanations to clarify various aspects of our work. However, to ensure clarity and emphasize the core contributions of our work, we would like to summarize the main points here briefly:

- We build an automatic annotation pipeline that utilizes powerful LLMs (e.g. Llama-3-70B) to generate **_high-quality functionality descriptions_** for massive GUI elements. We believe **this annotation pipeline as well as our 2M training samples** can benefit the community.

- Before submission, our AutoGUI contained 702k training samples. During this discussion phase, we expanded it to a **2M-scale dataset** and witnessed **significant performance gains brought by this augmented dataset** (Please refer to Q1 in the Reply to Reviewer ZWrk's Further Comments (Part 1)).

- We show the promising application of our functionality-focused AutoGUI dataset, which can be used to **boost downstream GUI agent task performance**. Thanks to Reviewer ZWrk's suggestion, we fine-tuned our model with downstream agent task data and observed high success rates. We also show that our model can assist VLM-based planners by providing detailed functionality descriptions of diverse GUIs.

We hope this work supports the community and assists other researchers in scaling our method to larger models and datasets. We will release the annotation pipeline, datasets, and training scripts to facilitate broader adoption and experimentation.


Kind regards,

Authors
</content>
</thread_object>

</thread>


Metareview:
metareview:
AutoGUI introduces a new dataset creation pipeline for generating high-quality GUI element functionality annotations, primarily focusing on websites and Android UIs. The resulting AutoGUI-704k dataset has been employed to fine-tune VLM baselines, leading to improved performance on UI grounding and reasoning tasks.

While the paper presents a valuable contribution to the field, certain concerns remain. A key issue raised by reviewer dSda, even after the rebuttal, is the long-term sustainability of LLM-based processes in maintaining high-quality annotations as the dataset scales. Additionally, reviewer vvNy expressed concerns about the overall utility of AutoGUI and potential data quality issues.

Thanks for flagging ZWrk. This decision has taken into account this.