Do GUI Agents Know When Not to Act? Enabling Conflict-Aware Termination for Multimodal GUI Agents
Introduces CONFLICTGUI, a benchmark evaluating conflict-aware termination in multimodal GUI agents across instruction-internal and instruction-GUI context conflicts Reveals severe execution-biased overcompliance: capable agents blindly execute conflicting instructions instead of recognizing infeasibility Proposes CONFLICTGUARD, an inference-time framework with feasibility verification and conditional action modulation to align awareness with action generation Demonstrates significant improvement
Analysis
TL;DR
- Introduces CONFLICTGUI, a benchmark evaluating conflict-aware termination in multimodal GUI agents across instruction-internal and instruction-GUI context conflicts
- Reveals severe execution-biased overcompliance: capable agents blindly execute conflicting instructions instead of recognizing infeasibility
- Proposes CONFLICTGUARD, an inference-time framework with feasibility verification and conditional action modulation to align awareness with action generation
- Demonstrates significant improvement in conflict task success rates across five widely-used agents while preserving normal GUI-task performance
- Validates that lightweight inference-time intervention can substantially enhance GUI agents' ability to identify and refrain from inappropriate execution
Why It Matters
This work addresses a critical reliability gap in GUI agents—overcompliance with infeasible user instructions—which is essential for real-world deployment where users frequently make benign mistakes. For AI practitioners building agent systems, understanding and mitigating blind execution behavior is crucial for creating trustworthy, user-safe interfaces that can appropriately decline or terminate rather than blindly follow flawed instructions.
Technical Details
- CONFLICTGUI Benchmark: Covers two conflict types—(1) instruction-internal conflicts (contradictory elements within the instruction itself) and (2) instruction-GUI context conflicts (instructions that contradict the current GUI state or available elements)
- CONFLICTGUARD Framework: An inference-time intervention with two coupled components: (a) a feasibility verification protocol that guides agents to assess instruction logic and GUI-side evidence before acting, and (b) a conditional action modulation mechanism that steers agents from over-compliant execution toward termination-oriented behavior
- Evaluation: Tested across five widely-used multimodal GUI agents, measuring both conflict task success rates and normal task performance preservation
- Key Finding: Agents that perform well on feasible tasks exhibit severe overcompliance under conflicting instructions, continuing execution blindly rather than recognizing infeasibility
- Approach: No fine-tuning required—intervention operates at inference time, making it broadly applicable to existing agent architectures
Industry Insight
- GUI agent systems deployed in production should incorporate conflict-aware termination mechanisms to prevent costly errors from blind execution of infeasible user requests
- The inference-time intervention approach (CONFLICTGUARD) offers a practical, lightweight path to improving agent reliability without retraining, making it immediately adoptable for existing systems
- As GUI agents become more prevalent in enterprise and consumer applications, overcompliance represents a significant trust and safety risk that benchmarking frameworks like CONFLICTGUI will help the community systematically address
Disclaimer: The above content is generated by AI and is for reference only.