In plain words: A vision-and-language model for phone screens splits each screen in two and zooms in so tiny icons and text stay readable, learning from labeled tasks like finding text and listing widgets. It beats GPT-4V on every basic screen task tested.
Abstract · Ferret-UI: Grounded Mobile UI Understanding with Multimodal LLMs
Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have been noteworthy, yet, these general-domain MLLMs often fall short in their ability to comprehend and interact effectively with user interface (UI) screens. In this paper, we present Ferret-UI, a new MLLM tailored for enhanced understanding of mobile UI screens, equipped with referring, grounding, and reasoning capabilities. Given that UI screens typically exhibit a more elongated aspect ratio and contain smaller objects of interest (e.g., icons, texts) than natural images, we incorporate "any resolution" on top of Ferret to magnify details and leverage enhanced visual features. Specifically, each screen is divided into 2 sub-images based on the original aspect ratio (i.e., horizontal division for portrait screens and vertical division for landscape screens). Both sub-images are encoded separately before being sent to LLMs. We meticulously gather training samples from an extensive range of elementary UI tasks, such as icon recognition, find text, and widget listing. These samples are formatted for instruction-following with region annotations to facilitate precise referring and grounding. To augment the model's reasoning ability, we further compile a dataset for advanced tasks, including detailed description, perception/interaction conversations, and function inference. After training on the curated datasets, Ferret-UI exhibits outstanding comprehension of UI screens and the capability to execute open-ended instructions. For model evaluation, we establish a comprehensive benchmark encompassing all the aforementioned tasks. Ferret-UI excels not only beyond most open-source UI MLLMs, but also surpasses GPT-4V on all the elementary UI tasks.
Keen You, Haotian Zhang, Eldon Schoop, Floris Weers, Amanda Swearngin, Jeffrey Nichols, Yinfei Yang, Zhe Gan
arXiv:2404.05719 · cs.CV, cs.CL, cs.HC · submitted Apr 8, 2024
abstract · pdf · html
Apple could also go for the more aggressive approach and allow their model the ability to interact with apps that haven't exposed specific functions. Might be useful for slow moving apps or apps that don't want to be automated. I'm of two mind on that last part. On one hand, as a developer, I can see the potential for abuse but as user I don't want to wait on app developer or wait for an interaction to be "blessed" before I can use it.
For example, I love Prologue [1] (audiobook app using my Plex server) and the developer is quite good about exposing Shortcut actions but there are times where I might want to use Audible for things like WhisperSync. The issue is that Audible doesn't expose the same things I use daily (widget on homescreen to start playing my book where I left off and ability to set a sleep timer via Siri/Shortcuts. I regularly use that to extend a sleep timer while laying in bed if I haven't fallen asleep yet). I'd be interested in being able to use a LLM to add the features I want to the Audible app in those cases.
[0] https://www.rabbit.tech/
[1] https://prologue.audio/