Daily Papers

Conversational agents show the promise to allow users to interact with mobile devices using language. However, to perform diverse UI tasks with natural language, developers typically need to create separate datasets and models for each specific task, which is expensive and effort-consuming. Recently, pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have been shown capable of generalizing to various downstream tasks when prompted with a handful of examples from the target task. This paper investigates the feasibility of enabling versatile conversational interactions with mobile UIs using a single LLM. We designed prompting techniques to adapt an LLM to mobile UIs. We experimented with four important modeling tasks that address various scenarios in conversational interaction. Our method achieved competitive performance on these challenging tasks without requiring dedicated datasets and training, offering a lightweight and generalizable approach to enable language-based mobile interaction.

Mobile User Interface Summarization generates succinct language descriptions of mobile screens for conveying important contents and functionalities of the screen, which can be useful for many language-based application scenarios. We present Screen2Words, a novel screen summarization approach that automatically encapsulates essential information of a UI screen into a coherent language phrase. Summarizing mobile screens requires a holistic understanding of the multi-modal data of mobile UIs, including text, image, structures as well as UI semantics, motivating our multi-modal learning approach. We collected and analyzed a large-scale screen summarization dataset annotated by human workers. Our dataset contains more than 112k language summarization across sim22k unique UI screens. We then experimented with a set of deep models with different configurations. Our evaluation of these models with both automatic accuracy metrics and human rating shows that our approach can generate high-quality summaries for mobile screens. We demonstrate potential use cases of Screen2Words and open-source our dataset and model to lay the foundations for further bridging language and user interfaces.

Natural language descriptions of user interface (UI) elements such as alternative text are crucial for accessibility and language-based interaction in general. Yet, these descriptions are constantly missing in mobile UIs. We propose widget captioning, a novel task for automatically generating language descriptions for UI elements from multimodal input including both the image and the structural representations of user interfaces. We collected a large-scale dataset for widget captioning with crowdsourcing. Our dataset contains 162,859 language phrases created by human workers for annotating 61,285 UI elements across 21,750 unique UI screens. We thoroughly analyze the dataset, and train and evaluate a set of deep model configurations to investigate how each feature modality as well as the choice of learning strategies impact the quality of predicted captions. The task formulation and the dataset as well as our benchmark models contribute a solid basis for this novel multimodal captioning task that connects language and user interfaces.

Most existing GUI agents typically depend on non-vision inputs like HTML source code or accessibility trees, limiting their flexibility across diverse software environments and platforms. Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs), which excel at using vision to ground real-world objects, offer a potential alternative. However, they often struggle with accurately localizing GUI elements -- a critical requirement for effective GUI automation -- due to the semantic gap between real-world objects and GUI elements. In this work, we introduce Ponder & Press, a divide-and-conquer framework for general computer control using only visual input. Our approach combines an general-purpose MLLM as an 'interpreter', responsible for translating high-level user instructions into detailed action descriptions, with a GUI-specific MLLM as a 'locator' that precisely locates GUI elements for action placement. By leveraging a purely visual input, our agent offers a versatile, human-like interaction paradigm applicable to a wide range of applications. Ponder & Press locator outperforms existing models by +22.5% on the ScreenSpot GUI grounding benchmark. Both offline and interactive agent benchmarks across various GUI environments -- including web pages, desktop software, and mobile UIs -- demonstrate that Ponder & Press framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the potential of visual GUI agents. Refer to the project homepage https://invinciblewyq.github.io/ponder-press-page/

GUI (graphical user interface) prototyping is a widely-used technique in requirements engineering for gathering and refining requirements, reducing development risks and increasing stakeholder engagement. However, GUI prototyping can be a time-consuming and costly process. In recent years, deep learning models such as Stable Diffusion have emerged as a powerful text-to-image tool capable of generating detailed images based on text prompts. In this paper, we propose UI-Diffuser, an approach that leverages Stable Diffusion to generate mobile UIs through simple textual descriptions and UI components. Preliminary results show that UI-Diffuser provides an efficient and cost-effective way to generate mobile GUI designs while reducing the need for extensive prototyping efforts. This approach has the potential to significantly improve the speed and efficiency of GUI prototyping in requirements engineering.

The recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have stimulated interest among researchers and industry professionals, particularly in their application to tasks concerning mobile user interfaces (UIs). This position paper investigates the use of LLMs for UI layout generation. Central to our exploration is the introduction of UI grammar -- a novel approach we proposed to represent the hierarchical structure inherent in UI screens. The aim of this approach is to guide the generative capacities of LLMs more effectively and improve the explainability and controllability of the process. Initial experiments conducted with GPT-4 showed the promising capability of LLMs to produce high-quality user interfaces via in-context learning. Furthermore, our preliminary comparative study suggested the potential of the grammar-based approach in improving the quality of generative results in specific aspects.

Mobile app user interfaces (UIs) are rich with action, text, structure, and image content that can be utilized to learn generic UI representations for tasks like automating user commands, summarizing content, and evaluating the accessibility of user interfaces. Prior work has learned strong visual representations with local or global captioning losses, but fails to retain both granularities. To combat this, we propose Textual Foresight, a novel pretraining objective for learning UI screen representations. Textual Foresight generates global text descriptions of future UI states given a current UI and local action taken. Our approach requires joint reasoning over elements and entire screens, resulting in improved UI features: on generation tasks, UI agents trained with Textual Foresight outperform state-of-the-art by 2% with 28x fewer images. We train with our newly constructed mobile app dataset, OpenApp, which results in the first public dataset for app UI representation learning. OpenApp enables new baselines, and we find Textual Foresight improves average task performance over them by 5.7% while having access to 2x less data.

As mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous, regularly interacting with a variety of user interfaces (UIs) is a common aspect of daily life for many people. To improve the accessibility of these devices and to enable their usage in a variety of settings, building models that can assist users and accomplish tasks through the UI is vitally important. However, there are several challenges to achieve this. First, UI components of similar appearance can have different functionalities, making understanding their function more important than just analyzing their appearance. Second, domain-specific features like Document Object Model (DOM) in web pages and View Hierarchy (VH) in mobile applications provide important signals about the semantics of UI elements, but these features are not in a natural language format. Third, owing to a large diversity in UIs and absence of standard DOM or VH representations, building a UI understanding model with high coverage requires large amounts of training data. Inspired by the success of pre-training based approaches in NLP for tackling a variety of problems in a data-efficient way, we introduce a new pre-trained UI representation model called ActionBert. Our methodology is designed to leverage visual, linguistic and domain-specific features in user interaction traces to pre-train generic feature representations of UIs and their components. Our key intuition is that user actions, e.g., a sequence of clicks on different UI components, reveals important information about their functionality. We evaluate the proposed model on a wide variety of downstream tasks, ranging from icon classification to UI component retrieval based on its natural language description. Experiments show that the proposed ActionBert model outperforms multi-modal baselines across all downstream tasks by up to 15.5%.

Extracting semantic representations from mobile user interfaces (UI) and using the representations for designers' decision-making processes have shown the potential to be effective computational design support tools. Current approaches rely on machine learning models trained on small-sized mobile UI datasets to extract semantic vectors and use screenshot-to-screenshot comparison to retrieve similar-looking UIs given query screenshots. However, the usability of these methods is limited because they are often not open-sourced and have complex training pipelines for practitioners to follow, and are unable to perform screenshot set-to-set (i.e., app-to-app) retrieval. To this end, we (1) employ visual models trained with large web-scale images and test whether they could extract a UI representation in a zero-shot way and outperform existing specialized models, and (2) use mathematically founded methods to enable app-to-app retrieval and design consistency analysis. Our experiments show that our methods not only improve upon previous retrieval models but also enable multiple new applications.

Different types of user interfaces differ significantly in the number of elements and how they are displayed. To examine how such differences affect the way users look at UIs, we collected and analyzed a large eye-tracking-based dataset, UEyes (62 participants, 1,980 UI screenshots, near 20K eye movement sequences), covering four major UI types: webpage, desktop UI, mobile UI, and poster. Furthermore, we analyze and discuss the differences in important factors, such as color, location, and gaze direction across UI types, individual viewing strategies and potential future directions. This position paper is a derivative of our recent paper with a particular focus on the UEyes dataset.