Test-Time Self-Evolving GUI Visual Grounding via Reflection-Guided On-Policy Self-Distillation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11191v1
• Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:50:25 GMT
• Title: Test-Time Self-Evolving GUI Visual Grounding via Reflection-Guided On-Policy Self-Distillation
• Abstract summary: Existing models typically freeze their parameters after deployment, limiting their ability to adapt to unseen interfaces.<n>We propose a Test-Time Self-Evolving framework that enables models to improve after deployment without human-annotated ground truth.
• Score: 39.97509184324128
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: GUI Visual Grounding is a fundamental capability for GUI agents. Existing models typically freeze their parameters after deployment, limiting their ability to adapt to unseen interfaces. Although recent methods attempt to adapt models via test-time reinforcement learning, they cannot reflect upon failed exploration. To overcome this, we propose a Test-Time Self-Evolving framework that enables models to improve after deployment without human-annotated ground truth. It constructs a closed-loop of Exploration, Evaluation, Reflection, and Internalization. Specifically, the agent first explores unseen interfaces by predicting grounding coordinates for given instructions. To evaluate these explorations, we introduce an MLLM-based Reflector to assess the generated results and provide the corresponding reasoning reflections. To internalize reflection knowledge into the model weights, we propose Reflection-Guided On-Policy Self-Distillation, which translates high-level reasoning into dense token-level supervision via a conditioned self-teacher. Furthermore, we design a Contrastive Calibration method to prevent incorrect auto-regressive prefixes from corrupting the supervisory signals during failed explorations. Extensive experiments across six benchmarks demonstrate our framework's effectiveness, achieving an average accuracy improvement of 7.4% over the base model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to successfully exploit on-policy self-distillation for test-time adaptation in GUI visual grounding. By filling the gap in post-deployment adaptation, our framework completes the self-evolving capability of GUI agents. The code will be released.

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