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Spotlight: Mobile UI Understanding using Vision-Language Models with a Focus

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arxiv 2209.14927 v4 pith:NBIR4TUG submitted 2022-09-29 cs.CV cs.HCcs.LG

Spotlight: Mobile UI Understanding using Vision-Language Models with a Focus

classification cs.CV cs.HCcs.LG
keywords mobiletasksviewhierarchiesmodelmodelingscreenspotlight
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Mobile UI understanding is important for enabling various interaction tasks such as UI automation and accessibility. Previous mobile UI modeling often depends on the view hierarchy information of a screen, which directly provides the structural data of the UI, with the hope to bypass challenging tasks of visual modeling from screen pixels. However, view hierarchies are not always available, and are often corrupted with missing object descriptions or misaligned structure information. As a result, despite the use of view hierarchies could offer short-term gains, it may ultimately hinder the applicability and performance of the model. In this paper, we propose Spotlight, a vision-only approach for mobile UI understanding. Specifically, we enhance a vision-language model that only takes the screenshot of the UI and a region of interest on the screen -- the focus -- as the input. This general architecture of Spotlight is easily scalable and capable of performing a range of UI modeling tasks. Our experiments show that our model establishes SoTA results on several representative UI tasks and outperforms previous methods that use both screenshots and view hierarchies as inputs. Furthermore, we explore multi-task learning and few-shot prompting capacities of the proposed models, demonstrating promising results in the multi-task learning direction.

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Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

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    SeeClick improves visual GUI agents via GUI grounding pre-training on automatically curated data and introduces the ScreenSpot benchmark, with results indicating that stronger grounding boosts downstream task performance.

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