English

OS-Kairos: Adaptive Interaction for MLLM-Powered GUI Agents

Human-Computer Interaction 2025-07-15 v3 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Autonomous graphical user interface (GUI) agents powered by multimodal large language models have shown great promise. However, a critical yet underexplored issue persists: over-execution, where the agent executes tasks in a fully autonomous way, without adequate assessment of its action confidence to compromise an adaptive human-agent collaboration. This poses substantial risks in complex scenarios, such as those involving ambiguous user instructions, unexpected interruptions, and environmental hijacks. To address the issue, we introduce OS-Kairos, an adaptive GUI agent capable of predicting confidence levels at each interaction step and efficiently deciding whether to act autonomously or seek human intervention. OS-Kairos is developed through two key mechanisms: (i) collaborative probing that annotates confidence scores at each interaction step; (ii) confidence-driven interaction that leverages these confidence scores to elicit the ability of adaptive interaction. Experimental results show that OS-Kairos substantially outperforms existing models on our curated dataset featuring complex scenarios, as well as on established benchmarks such as AITZ and Meta-GUI, with 24.59\%\sim87.29\% improvements in task success rate. OS-Kairos facilitates an adaptive human-agent collaboration, prioritizing effectiveness, generality, scalability, and efficiency for real-world GUI interaction. The dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/Wuzheng02/OS-Kairos.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.16465,
  title  = {OS-Kairos: Adaptive Interaction for MLLM-Powered GUI Agents},
  author = {Pengzhou Cheng and Zheng Wu and Zongru Wu and Aston Zhang and Zhuosheng Zhang and Gongshen Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.16465},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

25 pages, 24 figures, 11 tables (ACL 2025, Findings)

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:28:42.651Z