AgentLens: Adaptive Visual Modalities for Human-Agent Interaction in Mobile GUI Agents

Abstract:Mobile GUI agents can automate smartphone tasks by interacting directly with app interfaces, but how they should communicate with users during execution remains underexplored. Existing systems rely on two extremes: foreground execution, which maximizes transparency but prevents multitasking, and background execution, which supports multitasking but provides little visual awareness. Through iterative formative studies, we found that users prefer a hybrid model with just-in-time visual interaction, but the most effective visualization modality depends on the task. Motivated by this, we present AgentLens, a mobile GUI agent that adaptively uses three visual modalities during human-agent interaction: Full UI, Partial UI, and GenUI. AgentLens extends a standard mobile agent with adaptive communication actions and uses Virtual Display to enable background execution with selective visual overlays. In a controlled study with 21 participants, AgentLens was preferred by 85.7% of participants and achieved the highest usability (1.94 Overall PSSUQ) and adoption-intent (6.43/7).

Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA)

arXiv:2604.20279 [cs.HC]

(or arXiv:2604.20279v3 [cs.HC] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.20279 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

https://doi.org/10.1145/3830398.3830619 Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources

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