Graphical user interface (GUI) grounding, the process of mapping human instructions to GUI actions, serves as a fundamental basis to autonomous GUI agents. While existing grounding models achieve promising performance to simulate the mouse click action on various click-based benchmarks, another essential mode of mouse interaction, namely dragging, remains largely underexplored. Yet, dragging the mouse to select and manipulate textual content represents a prevalent and important usage in practical GUI scenarios. To narrow this gap, we first introduce GUI-Drag, a diverse dataset of 161K text dragging examples synthesized through a scalable pipeline. To support systematic and robust evaluation, we further construct ScreenDrag, a benchmark with 5,333 examples spanning three levels of interface context, together with three dedicated metrics designed for assessing text dragging capability. Models trained on GUI-Drag with an efficient continual training strategy achieve substantial improvements on ScreenDrag, while preserving the original click-based performance on ScreenSpot, ScreenSpot-v2, and OSWorld-G. Our work encourages further research on broader GUI grounding beyond just clicking and paves way toward a truly generalist GUI grounding model. All benchmark, data, checkpoints, and code are open-sourced and available at https:\/\/osu-nlp-group.github.io\/GUI-Drag.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Graphical user interface (GUI) grounding, the process of mapping human instructions to GUI actions, serves as a fundamental basis to autonomous GUI agents. While existing grounding models achieve promising performance to simulate the mouse click action on various click-based benchmarks, another essential mode of mouse interaction, namely dragging, remains largely underexplored. Yet, dragging the mouse […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"abs\/2601.06031","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"","msr_doi":"","msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_mag_id":"","msr_pubmed_id":"","msr_other_authors":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_award":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_institution":"","msr_host":"","msr_version":"","msr_duration":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_s2_match_type":"","msr_citation_count_updated":"","msr_published_date":"2025-11-07","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_notes":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_conference_url":"","msr_journal_url":"","msr_s2_pdf_url":"","msr_year":0,"msr_citation_count":0,"msr_influential_citations":0,"msr_reference_count":0,"msr_s2_match_confidence":0,"msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":false,"msr_s2_open_access":false,"msr_s2_author_ids":[],"msr_pub_ids":[{"provider":"s2","id":"67636cef3c00781bf4a6928a386c8c4102ba55f5"},{"provider":"doi","id":"10.48550\/arXiv.2601.06031"},{"provider":"arxiv","id":"2601.06031"}],"msr_hide_image_in_river":null,"footnotes":""},"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13556,13554],"msr-publication-type":[193715],"msr-publisher":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[246694,246691],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[268188],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-1171667","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-artificial-intelligence","msr-research-area-human-computer-interaction","msr-locale-en_us","msr-field-of-study-artificial-intelligence","msr-field-of-study-computer-science"],"msr_publishername":"","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2025-11-07","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"abs\/2601.06031","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":0,"msr_main_download":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"doi","viewUrl":"false","id":"false","title":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.48550\/arXiv.2601.06031","label_id":"243106","label":0},{"type":"url","viewUrl":"false","id":"false","title":"https:\/\/dblp.org\/rec\/journals\/corr\/abs-2601-06031.html","label_id":"243109","label":0},{"type":"url","viewUrl":"false","id":"false","title":"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2601.06031","label_id":"243109","label":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_citation_count":0,"msr_citation_count_updated":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_influential_citations":0,"msr_reference_count":0,"msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_author_ids":[],"msr_s2_open_access":false,"msr_s2_pdf_url":null,"msr_attachments":[],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"name","value":"Zeyi Liao","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Yadong Lu","user_id":44158,"rest_url":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Yadong Lu"},{"type":"name","value":"Boyu Gou","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"name","value":"Huan Sun","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Ahmed Awadallah","user_id":31979,"rest_url":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Ahmed Awadallah"}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[],"msr_event":[],"msr_group":[],"msr_project":[],"publication":[],"video":[],"msr-tool":[],"msr_publication_type":"article","related_content":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/1171667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-research-item"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/1171667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1171952,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/1171667\/revisions\/1171952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1171667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-research-highlight","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-highlight?post=1171667"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=1171667"},{"taxonomy":"msr-publication-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-publication-type?post=1171667"},{"taxonomy":"msr-publisher","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-publisher?post=1171667"},{"taxonomy":"msr-focus-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-focus-area?post=1171667"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=1171667"},{"taxonomy":"msr-post-option","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-post-option?post=1171667"},{"taxonomy":"msr-field-of-study","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-field-of-study?post=1171667"},{"taxonomy":"msr-conference","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-conference?post=1171667"},{"taxonomy":"msr-journal","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-journal?post=1171667"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=1171667"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=1171667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}