GoClick: Lightweight Element Grounding Model for Autonomous GUI Interaction

Hongxin Li, Yuntao Chen, Zhaoxiang Zhang — Graphical User Interface (GUI) element grounding (precisely locating elements on screenshots based on natural language instructions) is fundamental for agents interacting with GUIs. Deploying this capability directly on resource-constrained devices like mobile phones is increasingly critical for GUI agents requiring low latency. However, this goal faces a significant challenge, as current visual grounding methods typically employ large vision-language model (VLM) (more than 2.5B parameters), making them impractical for on-device execution due to memory and computational constraints. To address this, this paper introduces GoClick, a lightweight GUI element grounding VLM with only 230M parameters that achieves excellent visual grounding accuracy, even on par with significantly larger models. Simply downsizing existing decoder-only VLMs is a straightforward way to design a lightweight model, but our experiments reveal that this approach yields suboptimal results. Instead, we select an encoder-decoder architecture, which outperforms decoder-only alternatives at small parameter scales for GUI grounding tasks. Additionally, the limited capacity of small VLMs encourages us to develop a Progressive Data Refinement pipeline that utilizes task type filtering and data ratio adjustment to extract a high-quality 3.8M-sample core set from a 10.8M raw dataset. Training GoClick using this core set brings notable grounding accuracy gains. Our experim