GUI-Lens: Coarse-to-Fine Cropping for GUI Grounding with General-Purpose VLMs

GUI grounding maps natural-language instructions to click locations and is essential for reliable GUI agents. The task remains difficult on high-resolution, densely populated interfaces because a vision-language model (VLM) may recognize a requested control without locating it precisely enough for interaction. Most existing methods provide various forms of localization assistance, but still rely on a direct click prediction, allowing visual ambiguity or an inaccurate initial estimate to propagate to the final result. In this paper, we introduce GUI-Lens, a coarse-to-fine grounding framework that allows a general-purpose VLM to determine the target through active visual observations. Specifically, GUI-Lens extracts OCR text and detected UI components from the screenshot and presents their positions as coordinate references. Using the instruction, the current view, and these references, the model narrows the search region step by step rather than committing to a single guess.

Code is available at Fzkuji/GUI-Agent-Harness.

Citation: Zichuan Fu, Shirong Wang, Wenlin Zhang, Guojing Li, Yimin Deng, Jingtong Gao, Junjia Qi, Hanyu Yan, Yefeng Zheng, Xiaopeng Li, Wanyu Wang, Xian Wu, and Xiangyu Zhao. 2026. GUI-Lens: Coarse-to-Fine Cropping for GUI Grounding with General-Purpose VLMs. arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.03270. arXiv:2608.03270
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