arXiv:2507.10610v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Graphical user interface (GUI) agents built on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently demonstrated strong decision-making abilities in screen-based interaction tasks. However, they remain highly vulnerable to pop-up-based environmental injection attacks, where malicious visual elements divert model attention and lead to unsafe or incorrect actions. Existing defense methods either require costly retraining or perform poorly under inductive interference. In this work, we systematically study how such attacks alter the attention behavior of GUI agents and uncover a layer-wise attention divergence pattern between correct and incorrect outputs. Based on this insight, we propose \textbf{LaSM}, a \textit{Layer-wise Scaling Mechanism} that selectively amplifies attention and MLP modules in critical layers. LaSM improves the alignment between model saliency and task-relevant regions without additional training. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improves the defense success rate and exhibits strong robustness, while having negligible impact on the model's general capabilities. Our findings reveal that attention misalignment is a core vulnerability in MLLM agents and can be effectively addressed through selective layer-wise modulation. Our code can be found in https://github.com/YANGTUOMAO/LaSM.

arXiv:2509.13615v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The advent of multimodal agents facilitates effective interaction within graphical user interface (GUI), especially in ubiquitous GUI control. However, their inability to reliably execute toggle control instructions remains a key bottleneck. To investigate this, we construct a state control benchmark with binary toggle instructions derived from public datasets. Evaluation results of existing agents demonstrate their notable unreliability, particularly when the current toggle state already matches the desired state. To address the challenge, we propose State-aware Reasoning (StaR), a multimodal reasoning method that enables agents to perceive the current toggle state, infer the desired state from the instruction, and act accordingly. Experiments on four multimodal agents demonstrate that StaR can improve toggle instruction execution accuracy by over 30\%. Further evaluations on three public agentic benchmarks show that StaR also enhances general agentic task performance. Finally, evaluations on a dynamic environment highlight the potential of StaR for real-world applications. Code and benchmark: https://github.com/ZrW00/StaR.

arXiv:2511.22235v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid development of large vision-language model (VLM) has greatly promoted the research of GUI agent. However, GUI agents still face significant challenges in handling long-horizon tasks. First, single-agent models struggle to balance high-level capabilities and low-level execution capability, facing prevalent issues of responsibility coupling and capability conflicts. Second, agents lack awareness of the task state, leading to progress loss in long-horizon tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a staged execution-feedback reinforcement learning algorithm. Unlike training a unified policy model, we focus on training high-level scheduling models. Specifically, we propose and train two agents: a Coordinator, responsible for the strategic planning and task decomposition; and a State Tracker, responsible for context compression and information management to maintain the task's state and coherence. Based on this, we built the Coordinator-Executor-State Tracker (CES) multi-agent framework, which can be integrated with any low-level Executor model, assisting the Executor in solving long-horizon tasks through task scheduling and state management. Experiments on long-horizon task benchmarks demonstrate that CES significantly enhances the system's planning and state management capabilities. Furthermore, analysis confirms that our trained high-level scheduling module is a generalizable, plug-and-play module that significantly enhances the long-horizon capabilities of various Executors. Code can be available at https://github.com/hehehahi4/CES.

arXiv:2509.13615v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The advent of multimodal agents facilitates effective interaction within graphical user interface (GUI), especially in ubiquitous GUI control. However, their inability to reliably execute toggle control instructions remains a key bottleneck. To investigate this, we construct a state control benchmark with binary toggle instructions derived from public datasets. Evaluation results of existing agents demonstrate their notable unreliability, particularly when the current toggle state already matches the desired state. To address the challenge, we propose State-aware Reasoning (StaR), a multimodal reasoning method that enables agents to perceive the current toggle state, infer the desired state from the instruction, and act accordingly. Experiments on four multimodal agents demonstrate that StaR can improve toggle instruction execution accuracy by over 30\%. Further evaluations on three public agentic benchmarks show that StaR also enhances general agentic task performance. Finally, evaluations on a dynamic environment highlight the potential of StaR for real-world applications. Code and benchmark: https://github.com/ZrW00/StaR.