AppAgent: Multimodal Agents as Smartphone Users

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to the creation of intelligent agents capable of performing complex tasks. This paper introduces a novel LLM-based multimodal agent framework designed to operate smartphone applications. Our framework enables the agent to operate smartphone applications through a simplified action space, mimicking human-like interactions such as tapping and swiping. This novel approach bypasses the need for system back-end access, thereby broadening its applicability across diverse apps. Central to our agent's functionality is its innovative learning method. The agent learns to navigate and use new apps either through autonomous exploration or by observing human demonstrations. This process generates a knowledge base that the agent refers to for executing complex tasks across different applications. To demonstrate the practicality of our agent, we conducted extensive testing over 50 tasks in 10 different applications, including social media, email, maps, shopping, and sophisticated image editing tools. The results affirm our agent's proficiency in handling a diverse array of high-level tasks.

DroidBot-GPT: GPT-powered UI Automation for Android

This paper introduces DroidBot-GPT, a tool that utilizes GPT-like large language models (LLMs) to automate the interactions with Android mobile applications. Given a natural language description of a desired task, DroidBot-GPT can automatically generate and execute actions that navigate the app to complete the task. It works by translating the app GUI state information and the available actions on the smartphone screen to natural language prompts and asking the LLM to make a choice of actions. Since the LLM is typically trained on a large amount of data including the how-to manuals of diverse software applications, it has the ability to make reasonable choices of actions based on the provided information. We evaluate DroidBot-GPT with a self-created dataset that contains 33 tasks collected from 17 Android applications spanning 10 categories. It can successfully complete 39.39% of the tasks, and the average partial completion progress is about 66.76%. Given the fact that our method is fully unsupervised (no modification required from both the app and the LLM), we believe there is great potential to enhance automation performance with better app development paradigms and/or custom model training.