STP-GUI: Spatially-Aware Token Pruning for Efficient Web-GUI Agents
Shuo Wang, Sifan Zhou, Xiaobo Wang, Tianyu Fu, Chenxu Zhao, Anyang Su, Hanning Wang, Ping Jiang, Minghui Wu
Abstract
With the rapid development of vision-language models (VLMs), Web-GUI agents have achieved promising performance in interacting with real-world interfaces through screenshot-based grounding. However, high-resolution screenshots and multi-turn histories introduce excessive visual tokens, causing substantial inference overhead. Existing token pruning methods, mainly designed for natural images, often select tokens independently based on importance scores, which can fragment the local visual structures required for recognizing small GUI elements such as buttons, icons, and hyperlinks. In this work, we propose STP-GUI (Spatially-aware Token Pruning for GUI agents), a query-guided token pruning framework that preserves fine-grained instruction-conditioned token scoring while performing spatially coherent window-level selection under aggressive token reduction. A lightweight selector is optimized through policy learning while the VLM backbone remains frozen. Experiments on Online-Mind2Web show that \papername achieves a favorable efficiency-performance tradeoff under low token budgets. At 21% token retention, it preserves 77.7% of full-token performance while reducing inference latency by 31% and FLOPs by 57%. Results on Android in the Wild further suggest that the method transfers to mobile GUI environments.