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Mulong Xie

Publications and source records attributed to Mulong Xie.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

CAP: A Scalable Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-Site Browser Agents with Complex Actions and Perception

Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents that interact with the web through browsers. While recent progress has been driven by benchmarks that evaluate end-to-end task success, these evaluations largely overlook two fundamental sources of difficulty in real web browsing: complex actions over rich user interfaces and visual perception of dynamically rendered content, especially in workflows that span multiple websites. We introduce CAP, a scalable benchmark for evaluating browser agents on cross-site, human-like web tasks that require non-trivial UI interactions and visual understanding. Specifically, we adopt a decomposition-and-recomposition pipeline that first abstracts each website into a structured site card capturing user-facing functions, complex execution operations, and perceptual requirements, and then recomposes these components into realistic cross-site workflows. Each task is therefore grounded in multiple specific operations on each website, enabling fine-grained diagnosis. Built on this framework, we construct 420 tasks across 108 real-world websites and 24 domains under careful quality control. Experiments on state-of-the-art browser agents using our verifiable agent-as-a-judge evaluation framework show low success rates and reveal that perception-heavy interactions remain a major bottleneck, exposing substantial gaps between current agents and real-world web browsing demands.

cs.AI

Software as Content: Dynamic Applications as the Human-Agent Interaction Layer

Chat-based natural language interfaces have emerged as the dominant paradigm for human-agent interaction, yet they fundamentally constrain engagement with structured information and complex tasks. We identify three inherent limitations: the mismatch between structured data and linear text, the high entropy of unconstrained natural language input, and the lack of persistent, evolving interaction state. We introduce Software as Content (SaC), a paradigm in which dynamically generated agentic applications serve as the primary medium of human-agent interaction. Rather than communicating through sequential text exchange, this medium renders task-specific interfaces that present structured information and expose actionable affordances through which users iteratively guide agent behavior without relying solely on language. These interfaces persist and evolve across interaction cycles, transforming from transient responses into a shared, stateful interaction layer that progressively converges toward personalized, task-specific software. We formalize SaC through a human-agent-environment interaction model, derive design principles for generating and evolving agentic applications, and present a system architecture that operationalizes the paradigm. We evaluate across representative tasks of selection, exploration, and execution, demonstrating technical viability and expressive range, while identifying boundary conditions under which natural language remains preferable. By reframing interfaces as dynamically generated software artifacts, SaC opens a new design space for human-AI interaction, positioning dynamic software as a concrete and tractable research object.

cs.HC

WebNavigator: Global Web Navigation via Interaction Graph Retrieval

Despite significant advances in autonomous web navigation, current methods remain far from human-level performance in complex web environments. We argue that this limitation stems from Topological Blindness, where agents are forced to explore via trial-and-error without access to the global topological structure of the environment. To overcome this limitation, we introduce WebNavigator, which reframes web navigation from probabilistic exploration into deterministic retrieval and pathfinding. WebNavigator constructs Interaction Graphs via zero-token cost heuristic exploration offline and implements a Retrieve-Reason-Teleport workflow for global navigation online. WebNavigator achieves state-of-the-art performance on WebArena and OnlineMind2Web. On WebArena multi-site tasks, WebNavigator achieves a 72.9\% success rate, more than doubling the performance of enterprise-level agents. This work reveals that Topological Blindness, rather than model reasoning capabilities alone, is an underestimated bottleneck in autonomous web navigation.

cs.IR

Towards Human-AI Synergy in UI Design: Supporting Iterative Generation with LLMs

In automated UI design generation, a key challenge is the lack of support for iterative processes, as most systems focus solely on end-to-end output. This stems from limited capabilities in interpreting design intent and a lack of transparency for refining intermediate results. To better understand these challenges, we conducted a formative study that identified concrete and actionable requirements for supporting iterative design with Generative Tools. Guided by these findings, we propose PrototypeFlow, a human-centered system for automated UI generation that leverages multi-modal inputs and models. PrototypeFlow takes natural language descriptions and layout preferences as input to generate the high-fidelity UI design. At its core is a theme design module that clarifies implicit design intent through prompt enhancement and orchestrates sub-modules for component-level generation. Designers retain full control over inputs, intermediate results, and final prototypes, enabling flexible and targeted refinement by steering generation and directly editing outputs. Our experiments and user studies confirmed the effectiveness and usefulness of our proposed PrototypeFlow.

cs.HC

NiCro: Purely Vision-based, Non-intrusive Cross-Device and Cross-Platform GUI Testing

To ensure app compatibility and smoothness of user experience across diverse devices and platforms, developers have to perform cross-device, cross-platform testing of their apps, which is laborious. There comes a recently increasing trend of using a record and replay approach to facilitate the testing process. However, the graphic user interface (GUI) of an app running on different devices and platforms differs dramatically. This complicates the record and replay process as the presence, appearance and layout of the GUI widgets in the recording phase and replaying phase can be inconsistent. Existing techniques resort to instrumenting into the underlying system to obtain the app metadata for widget identification and matching between various devices. But such intrusive practices are limited by the accessibility and accuracy of the metadata on different platforms. On the other hand, several recent works attempt to derive the GUI information by analyzing the GUI image. Nevertheless, their performance is curbed by the applied preliminary visual approaches and the failure to consider the divergence of the same GUI displayed on different devices. To address the challenge, we propose a non-intrusive cross-device and cross-platform system NiCro. NiCro utilizes the state-of-the-art GUI widget detector to detect widgets from GUI images and then analyses a set of comprehensive information to match the widgets across diverse devices. At the system level, NiCro can interact with a virtual device farm and a robotic arm system to perform cross-device, cross-platform testing non-intrusively. We first evaluated NiCro by comparing its multi-modal widget and GUI matching approach with 4 commonly used matching techniques. Then, we further examined its overall performance on 8 various devices, using it to record and replay 107 test cases of 28 popular apps and the home page to show its effectiveness.

cs.SE

Psychologically-Inspired, Unsupervised Inference of Perceptual Groups of GUI Widgets from GUI Images

Graphical User Interface (GUI) is not merely a collection of individual and unrelated widgets, but rather partitions discrete widgets into groups by various visual cues, thus forming higher-order perceptual units such as tab, menu, card or list. The ability to automatically segment a GUI into perceptual groups of widgets constitutes a fundamental component of visual intelligence to automate GUI design, implementation and automation tasks. Although humans can partition a GUI into meaningful perceptual groups of widgets in a highly reliable way, perceptual grouping is still an open challenge for computational approaches. Existing methods rely on ad-hoc heuristics or supervised machine learning that is dependent on specific GUI implementations and runtime information. Research in psychology and biological vision has formulated a set of principles (i.e., Gestalt theory of perception) that describe how humans group elements in visual scenes based on visual cues like connectivity, similarity, proximity and continuity. These principles are domain-independent and have been widely adopted by practitioners to structure content on GUIs to improve aesthetic pleasant and usability. Inspired by these principles, we present a novel unsupervised image-based method for inferring perceptual groups of GUI widgets. Our method requires only GUI pixel images, is independent of GUI implementation, and does not require any training data. The evaluation on a dataset of 1,091 GUIs collected from 772 mobile apps and 20 UI design mockups shows that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art ad-hoc heuristics-based baseline. Our perceptual grouping method creates the opportunities for improving UI-related software engineering tasks.

cs.HC

Efficiency Matters: Speeding Up Automated Testing with GUI Rendering Inference

Due to the importance of Android app quality assurance, many automated GUI testing tools have been developed. Although the test algorithms have been improved, the impact of GUI rendering has been overlooked. On the one hand, setting a long waiting time to execute events on fully rendered GUIs slows down the testing process. On the other hand, setting a short waiting time will cause the events to execute on partially rendered GUIs, which negatively affects the testing effectiveness. An optimal waiting time should strike a balance between effectiveness and efficiency. We propose AdaT, a lightweight image-based approach to dynamically adjust the inter-event time based on GUI rendering state. Given the real-time streaming on the GUI, AdaT presents a deep learning model to infer the rendering state, and synchronizes with the testing tool to schedule the next event when the GUI is fully rendered. The evaluations demonstrate the accuracy, efficiency, and effectiveness of our approach. We also integrate our approach with the existing automated testing tool to demonstrate the usefulness of AdaT in covering more activities and executing more events on fully rendered GUIs.

cs.SE

Read It, Don't Watch It: Captioning Bug Recordings Automatically

Screen recordings of mobile applications are easy to capture and include a wealth of information, making them a popular mechanism for users to inform developers of the problems encountered in the bug reports. However, watching the bug recordings and efficiently understanding the semantics of user actions can be time-consuming and tedious for developers. Inspired by the conception of the video subtitle in movie industry, we present a lightweight approach CAPdroid to caption bug recordings automatically. CAPdroid is a purely image-based and non-intrusive approach by using image processing and convolutional deep learning models to segment bug recordings, infer user action attributes, and generate subtitle descriptions. The automated experiments demonstrate the good performance of CAPdroid in inferring user actions from the recordings, and a user study confirms the usefulness of our generated step descriptions in assisting developers with bug replay.

cs.SE

Towards Benchmarking GUI Compatibility Testing on Mobile Applications

GUI is a bridge connecting user and application. Existing GUI testing tasks can be categorized into two groups: functionality testing and compatibility testing. While the functionality testing focuses on detecting application runtime bugs, the compatibility testing aims at detecting bugs resulting from device or platform difference. To automate testing procedures and improve testing efficiency, previous works have proposed dozens of tools. To evaluate these tools, in functionality testing, researchers have published testing benchmarks. Comparatively, in compatibility testing, the question of ``Do existing methods indeed effectively assist test cases replay?'' is not well answered. To answer this question and advance the related research in GUI compatibility testing, we propose a benchmark of GUI compatibility testing. In our experiments, we compare the replay success rate of existing tools. Based on the experimental results, we summarize causes which may lead to ineffectiveness in test case replay and propose opportunities for improving the state-of-the-art.

cs.SE

Object Detection for Graphical User Interface: Old Fashioned or Deep Learning or a Combination?

Detecting Graphical User Interface (GUI) elements in GUI images is a domain-specific object detection task. It supports many software engineering tasks, such as GUI animation and testing, GUI search and code generation. Existing studies for GUI element detection directly borrow the mature methods from computer vision (CV) domain, including old fashioned ones that rely on traditional image processing features (e.g., canny edge, contours), and deep learning models that learn to detect from large-scale GUI data. Unfortunately, these CV methods are not originally designed with the awareness of the unique characteristics of GUIs and GUI elements and the high localization accuracy of the GUI element detection task. We conduct the first large-scale empirical study of seven representative GUI element detection methods on over 50k GUI images to understand the capabilities, limitations and effective designs of these methods. This study not only sheds the light on the technical challenges to be addressed but also informs the design of new GUI element detection methods. We accordingly design a new GUI-specific old-fashioned method for non-text GUI element detection which adopts a novel top-down coarse-to-fine strategy, and incorporate it with the mature deep learning model for GUI text detection.Our evaluation on 25,000 GUI images shows that our method significantly advances the start-of-the-art performance in GUI element detection.

cs.CV