Video2GUI: Synthesizing Large-Scale Interaction Trajectories for Generalized GUI Agent Pretraining
Pith reviewed 2026-06-30 20:58 UTC · model grok-4.3
The pith
Video2GUI extracts 12 million GUI interaction trajectories from unlabeled videos to pretrain agents.
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
Core claim
Video2GUI is a fully automated framework that employs a coarse-to-fine filtering strategy to identify high-quality GUI tutorial videos from unlabeled internet videos and converts their visual content into structured agent trajectories. Applying the pipeline to 500 million video metadata entries yields the WildGUI dataset containing 12 million interaction trajectories across more than 1,500 applications and websites. Pre-training Qwen2.5-VL and Mimo-VL on WildGUI produces consistent improvements of 5-20% across multiple GUI grounding and action benchmarks, matching or surpassing state-of-the-art performance.
What carries the argument
The coarse-to-fine filtering strategy within Video2GUI that selects GUI tutorial videos and structures their content into accurate interaction trajectories for large-scale pretraining.
If this is right
- GUI agents can be pretrained on trajectories from thousands of diverse real-world applications without manual annotation.
- Existing multimodal models gain measurable improvements on grounding and action tasks after exposure to the dataset.
- The released dataset and pipeline support continued scaling of training data for generalized agents.
- Performance gains appear consistent across the two model families tested in the experiments.
Where Pith is reading between the lines
- The same video-to-trajectory approach could supply training data for agents in related interactive domains such as web navigation or mobile robotics.
- Mixing the automatically generated trajectories with smaller manually annotated sets might produce further gains.
- Future refinements could add verification steps to reduce any residual noise in the extracted sequences.
Load-bearing premise
The filtering strategy can reliably select high-quality videos and convert their content into accurate, structured trajectories without introducing substantial noise or systematic errors.
What would settle it
Pre-training the same models on WildGUI and measuring no improvement or a performance drop on the GUI benchmarks, or manual inspection revealing high rates of incorrect action sequences in the extracted trajectories.
Figures
read the original abstract
Recent advances in multimodal large language models have driven growing interest in graphical user interface (GUI) agents, yet their generalization remains constrained by the scarcity of large-scale training data spanning diverse real-world applications. Existing datasets rely heavily on costly manual annotations and are typically confined to narrow domains. To address this challenge, we propose Video2GUI, a fully automated framework that extracts grounded GUI interaction trajectories directly from unlabeled Internet videos. Video2GUI employs a coarse-to-fine filtering strategy to identify high-quality GUI tutorial videos and convert them into structured agent trajectories. Applying this pipeline to 500 million video metadata entries, we construct WildGUI, a large-scale dataset containing 12 million interaction trajectories spanning over 1,500 applications and websites. Pre-training Qwen2.5-VL and Mimo-VL on WildGUI yields consistent improvements of 5-20% across multiple GUI grounding and action benchmarks, matching or surpassing state-of-the-art performance. We will release both the WildGUI dataset and the Video2GUI pipeline to support future research of GUI agents.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper introduces Video2GUI, an automated coarse-to-fine pipeline that mines unlabeled internet videos to extract structured GUI interaction trajectories, yielding the WildGUI dataset of 12 million trajectories across >1,500 applications. It reports that pre-training Qwen2.5-VL and Mimo-VL on WildGUI produces 5-20% gains on GUI grounding and action benchmarks, reaching or exceeding prior state-of-the-art.
Significance. A scalable, annotation-free source of diverse real-world GUI trajectories would address a central bottleneck for GUI agents. If the extracted trajectories prove sufficiently accurate, the reported gains would indicate a practical route to improved generalization; the release of both dataset and pipeline would further amplify impact.
major comments (2)
- [Abstract, §4] Abstract and §4 (dataset construction): the claim that the coarse-to-fine filtering produces high-quality trajectories rests on an unquantified assumption; no human agreement rates, extraction error rates, or ablation removing low-confidence samples are supplied to anchor the 5-20% downstream gains.
- [§5] §5 (experiments): baseline comparisons and statistical tests for the reported improvements are not described; it is therefore unclear whether the gains are robust to different random seeds, trajectory noise levels, or alternative filtering thresholds.
minor comments (2)
- Notation for trajectory elements (e.g., action types, grounding coordinates) should be defined once in a table or figure caption rather than repeated inline.
- [§3] The 500-million metadata entry figure would benefit from a brief breakdown of how many videos survive each filtering stage.
Simulated Author's Rebuttal
We thank the referee for the constructive feedback. We address each major comment below and commit to revisions that strengthen the validation of trajectory quality and experimental reporting.
read point-by-point responses
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Referee: [Abstract, §4] Abstract and §4 (dataset construction): the claim that the coarse-to-fine filtering produces high-quality trajectories rests on an unquantified assumption; no human agreement rates, extraction error rates, or ablation removing low-confidence samples are supplied to anchor the 5-20% downstream gains.
Authors: We agree that the manuscript would benefit from direct quantification of trajectory quality. The original submission did not include human evaluation metrics or ablations on the filtering stages. In the revision we will add a human study on a sampled subset of trajectories reporting inter-annotator agreement and extraction error rates, together with an ablation that removes low-confidence samples and measures the resulting change in downstream pre-training gains. revision: yes
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Referee: [§5] §5 (experiments): baseline comparisons and statistical tests for the reported improvements are not described; it is therefore unclear whether the gains are robust to different random seeds, trajectory noise levels, or alternative filtering thresholds.
Authors: We acknowledge the need for more detailed experimental reporting. The revised §5 will expand the description of all baselines, report results averaged across multiple random seeds with standard deviations, and include statistical significance tests. We will also add supplementary experiments that vary trajectory noise levels and filtering thresholds to demonstrate robustness of the observed gains. revision: yes
Circularity Check
No significant circularity
full rationale
The paper constructs WildGUI via an automated Video2GUI pipeline applied to external video metadata, then measures downstream pretraining gains on separate GUI grounding and action benchmarks. No equations, fitted parameters, or claims reduce to self-definition or self-citation by construction; the central result is an empirical delta on held-out test sets after dataset creation.
Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger
axioms (1)
- domain assumption Internet videos contain sufficient high-quality GUI interaction examples that can be automatically identified and structured into agent trajectories.
Forward citations
Cited by 1 Pith paper
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ISE: An Execution-Grounded Recipe for Multi-Turn OS-Agent Trajectories
ISE creates 23,132 execution-grounded multi-turn OS agent trajectories via intent simulation and live execution, improving agent performance on ClawEval from 19.3 to 37.7 pass@1 with Qwen3-8B.
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
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[1]
GTA1: GUI Test-time Scaling Agent
URL https://api.semanticscholar. org/CorpusID:274859421. Yang, Y ., Li, D., Dai, Y ., Yang, Y ., Luo, Z., Zhao, Z., Hu, Z., Huang, J., Saha, A., Chen, Z., et al. Gta1: Gui test-time scaling agent.arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.05791, 2025. Ye, J., Zhang, X., Xu, H., Liu, H., Wang, J., Zhu, Z., Zheng, Z., Gao, F., Cao, J., Lu, Z., et al. Mobile-agent-v3: Fundam...
work page internal anchor Pith review Pith/arXiv arXiv 2025
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[2]
**Screen Recordings: ** Direct capture of a computer, tablet, or smartphone screen
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[3]
**Software Interaction: ** Users interacting with graphical user interfaces (e.g ., clicking, typing, navigating menus, using tools)
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[4]
Not Relevant
**Application Demos/Tutorials: ** Walkthroughs of software (e.g., Photoshop, Excel, VS Code, Web Browsers, OS settings). 13 14A video is considered "Not Relevant" if it is: 15- Real-world camera footage (Vlogs, IRL, nature, people talking to camera without screen share). 16- Gaming content (unless it is a specific tutorial on UI/Settings). 17- Static slid...
2024
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[5]
Shot Splitting
mm:ss - mm:ss 24... 25(Split as granularly as possible.) 26 27You must strictly confine your analysis to the provided video segment ONLY. Do NOT generate any content for timestamps beyond the end of this provided segment. 28 29## Part 2: Task Annotations 30Second, after the "Shot Splitting" section, you must output a single JSON list [{...}, {...}]. 31Eac...
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[6]
Shot Segmentation
**Use Absolute Timestamps: ** All timestamps in your output (e.g., "Shot Segmentation") must be **absolute** (relative to the *full* video), not relative to the current clip
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[7]
Annotation History
**Maintain Consistency: ** Your new analysis must be fully **consistent** with the "Annotation History". Ensure that your interpretations, character analyses, and narrative arcs logically continue from the previous annotations
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[8]
Annotation History
**Use Global Context: ** You must use the "Annotation History" to understand the **global context ** (e.g., established narrative, characters, themes) to better interpret the events within the current clip. You are encouraged to cite specific evidence from the history (e.g., "which mirrors the action at 04:30") to enhance your interpretation
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[9]
Annotation History
**Do Not Mention Text in History: ** The "Annotation History" text is provided * only* for your internal context. Your output must **never** mention the existence of this text (e.g., do not write "Based on the history provided..." or "In the previous annotation..."). Your analysis must read as a single, seamless continuation of the history, as if you were...
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[10]
If the last sub-task is already complete, start a fresh sub-task with the next available index
**Continue unfinished tasks: ** If the last sub-task in the preceding part is incomplete, retain its task index and finish every remaining clip within that sub-task. If the last sub-task is already complete, start a fresh sub-task with the next available index. 22 23A more detailed task instruction for the current **[Current Start Time] - [Current End Tim...
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[11]
10 * Determine if the target element mentioned in the instruction (e.g., button, text field, icon) is **actually present and visible ** in the current ‘ screenshot‘
**Feasibility Check: ** 8 9 * Analyze the ‘screenshot‘ and ‘grounding_instruction‘. 10 * Determine if the target element mentioned in the instruction (e.g., button, text field, icon) is **actually present and visible ** in the current ‘ screenshot‘. 11
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[12]
feasible
**Grounding & Prediction: ** 13 14 * ** If not feasible ** (e.g., the ’Submit’ button mentioned in the instruction does not exist in the screenshot), set ‘feasible‘ to ‘false‘ in the 24 Video2GUI: Synthesizing Large-Scale Interaction Trajectories for Generalized GUI Agent Pretraining output and provide a reason. 15 * ** If feasible ** (the target element ...
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[13]
The center points must use relative coordinates (0-1000) and be formatted as follows: ‘<point>y x</point>‘
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[14]
Prompt 6: Prompt for GUI Grounding
The bounding boxes must use relative coordinates (0-1000) and be formatted as follows: ‘<bbox>y1 x1 y2 x2</bbox>‘. Prompt 6: Prompt for GUI Grounding
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[15]
{}\". Output a JSON in the format [{{\
Locate UI components that match the command: \"{}\". Output a JSON in the format [{{\"point\": [...], \"label\": \"{{the_whole_command}}\"}}, ...]. 2
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[16]
{}\". Output a JSON in the format [{{\
Locate UI components that match the command: \"{}\". Output a JSON in the format [{{\"bbox_2d\": [...], \"label\": \"{{the_whole_command}}\"}}, ...]. Prompt 7: Prompt for GUI Action Prediction
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[17]
action\": \
You are a GUI agent. You will be provided with a screenshot, a goal, and your action history. You need to perform the next action to complete the task.\n\n## Action Space\n{}\n\n## Goal\n{}\n\n## Previous Actions\n{}\n\nNow, output the next action in json format [{{\"action\": \"{{action_name}}\"}}, ...]. 2
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[18]
action\": \
You are a GUI agent. You will be provided with a screenshot, a goal, and your action history. You need to analyze the current situation and perform the next action to complete the task.\n\n## Action Space\n{}\n\n## Goal\n{}\n\n## Previous Actions\n{}\n\nPlease output your response in the following format:\n\ nThought: <your reasoning about what to do next...
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[19]
{}\", perform the next action to complete the task. Output a JSON in the format [{{\
Based on the screenshot and the goal: \"{}\", perform the next action to complete the task. Output a JSON in the format [{{\"action\": \"{{action_name }}\"}}, ...]. 2
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[20]
action\": \
Based on the screenshot and the goal: \"{}\", analyze the current situation and perform the next action to complete the task.\n\nPlease output your response in the following format:\n\nThought: <your reasoning about what to do next>\ nAction: <the action you will take>\n\n‘‘‘json\n[{{\"action\": \"{{action_name }}\"}}, ...]\n‘‘‘ 26 Video2GUI: Synthesizing...
discussion (0)
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