VisCritic: Visual State Comparison as Process Reward for GUI Agents

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24525v1
• Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2026 12:57:02 GMT
• Title: VisCritic: Visual State Comparison as Process Reward for GUI Agents
• Abstract summary: We introduce VisCritic, a visual process reward framework that verifies actions by directly comparing pre-action and post-action screenshots.<n>VisCritic employs a Siamese vision transformer to extract change-aware representations, coupled with an Action-Aware Critic Head.<n>Experiments and offline analyses demonstrate that VisCritic serves as a plug-and-play enhancement for diverse GUI agents.
• Score: 1.0998907972211756
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: GUI agents powered by vision-language models show strong potential for automating digital tasks, yet frequently fail in long-horizon scenarios due to the absence of step-level verification. Existing process reward models verify actions through textual reasoning alone, missing the visual nature of GUI state changes. We introduce VisCritic, a visual process reward framework that verifies agent actions by directly comparing pre-action and post-action screenshots in visual feature space. VisCritic employs a Siamese vision transformer to extract change-aware representations, coupled with an Action-Aware Critic Head that jointly evaluates action success, task progress, and error type. A critic-training data construction pipeline generates weakly supervised samples from existing trajectories without additional human labels for critic training. Experiments and offline analyses across five benchmarks demonstrate that VisCritic serves as a plug-and-play enhancement for diverse GUI agents, generally improving benchmark metrics while providing visual diagnostic cues.

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