ACL 2025finding0 citations

TransBench: Breaking Barriers for Transferable Graphical User Interface Agents in Dynamic Digital Environments

Yuheng Lu, Qian Yu, Hongru Wang, Zeming Liu, Wei Su, Yanping Liu, Yuhang Guo, Maocheng Liang

Abstract

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents, which autonomously operate on digital interfaces through natural language instructions, hold transformative potential for accessibility, automation, and user experience. A critical aspect of their functionality is grounding — the ability to map linguistic intents to visual and structural interface elements. However, existing GUI agents often struggle to adapt to the dynamic and interconnected nature of real-world digital environments, where tasks frequently span multiple platforms and applications while also being impacted by version updates. To address this, we introduce TransBench, the first benchmark designed to systematically evaluate and enhance the transferability of GUI agents across three key dimensions: cross-version transferability (adapting to version updates), cross-platform transferability (generalizing across platforms like iOS, Android, and Web), and cross-application transferability (handling tasks spanning functionally distinct apps). TransBench includes 15 app categories with diverse functionalities, capturing essential pages across versions and platforms to enable robust evaluation. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements in grounding accuracy, showcasing the practical utility of GUI agents in dynamic, real-world environments. Our code and data will be publicly available at GitHub.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{lu-etal-2025-transbench,
    title = "{T}rans{B}ench: Breaking Barriers for Transferable Graphical User Interface Agents in Dynamic Digital Environments",
    author = "Lu, Yuheng  and
      Yu, Qian  and
      Wang, Hongru  and
      Liu, Zeming  and
      Su, Wei  and
      Liu, Yanping  and
      Guo, Yuhang  and
      Liang, Maocheng  and
      Wang, Yunhong  and
      Wang, Haifeng",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.645/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.645",
    pages = "12464--12478",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5"
}