Beyond Clicking:A Step Towards Generalist GUI Grounding via Text Dragging

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06031v1
• Date: Fri, 07 Nov 2025 19:40:09 GMT
• Title: Beyond Clicking:A Step Towards Generalist GUI Grounding via Text Dragging
• Authors: Zeyi Liao, Yadong Lu, Boyu Gou, Huan Sun, Ahmed Awadallah,
• Abstract summary: dragging the mouse to select and manipulate textual content represents a prevalent and important usage in practical GUI scenarios.<n>We introduce GUI-Drag, a dataset of 161K text dragging examples synthesized through a scalable pipeline.<n>To support systematic and robust evaluation, we construct ScreenDrag, a benchmark with 5,333 examples spanning three levels of interface context.
• Score: 21.57463393334841
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Graphical user interface (GUI) grounding, the process of mapping human instructions to GUI actions, serves as a fundamental basis to autonomous GUI agents. While existing grounding models achieve promising performance to simulate the mouse click action on various click-based benchmarks, another essential mode of mouse interaction, namely dragging, remains largely underexplored. Yet, dragging the mouse to select and manipulate textual content represents a prevalent and important usage in practical GUI scenarios. To narrow this gap, we first introduce GUI-Drag, a diverse dataset of 161K text dragging examples synthesized through a scalable pipeline. To support systematic and robust evaluation, we further construct ScreenDrag, a benchmark with 5,333 examples spanning three levels of interface context, together with three dedicated metrics designed for assessing text dragging capability. Models trained on GUI-Drag with an efficient continual training strategy achieve substantial improvements on ScreenDrag, while preserving the original click-based performance on ScreenSpot, ScreenSpot-v2, and OSWorld-G. Our work encourages further research on broader GUI grounding beyond just clicking and paves way toward a truly generalist GUI grounding model. All benchmark, data, checkpoints, and code are open-sourced and available at https://osu-nlp-group.github.io/GUI-Drag.

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