BacktrackAgent: Enhancing GUI Agent with Error Detection and Backtracking Mechanism

Qinzhuo Wu, Pengzhi Gao, Wei Liu, Jian Luan


Abstract
Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents have gained substantial attention due to their impressive capabilities to complete tasks through multiple interactions within GUI environments. However, existing agents primarily focus on enhancing the accuracy of individual actions and often lack effective mechanisms for detecting and recovering from errors. To address these shortcomings, we propose the BacktrackAgent, a robust framework that incorporates a backtracking mechanism to improve task completion efficiency. BacktrackAgent includes verifier, judger, and reflector components as modules for error detection and recovery, while also applying judgment rewards to further enhance the agent’s performance. Additionally, we develop a training dataset specifically designed for the backtracking mechanism, which considers the outcome pages after action executions. Experimental results show that BacktrackAgent has achieved performance improvements in both task success rate and step accuracy on Mobile3M and Auto-UI benchmarks. Our data and code will be released upon acceptance.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.212
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4250–4272
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.212/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qinzhuo Wu, Pengzhi Gao, Wei Liu, and Jian Luan. 2025. BacktrackAgent: Enhancing GUI Agent with Error Detection and Backtracking Mechanism. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4250–4272, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
BacktrackAgent: Enhancing GUI Agent with Error Detection and Backtracking Mechanism (Wu et al., EMNLP 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.212.pdf
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