PhoneHarness: Harnessing Phone-Use Agents through Mixed GUI, CLI, and Tool Actions
Mirrored from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2606.14832 (cs)
[Submitted on 12 Jun 2026]
Title:PhoneHarness: Harnessing Phone-Use Agents through Mixed GUI, CLI, and Tool Actions
Authors:Chenxin Li, Zhengyao Fang, Zhengyang Tang, Pengyuan Lyu, Xingran Zhou, Xin Lai, Fei Tang, Liang Wu, Yiduo Guo, Weinong Wang, Junyi Li, Yi Zhang, Yang Ding, Huawen Shen, Sunqi Fan, Shangpin Peng, Zheng Ruan, Anran Zhang, Benyou Wang, Chengquan Zhang, Han Hu
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Abstract:Phone agents are increasingly expected to complete real mobile workflows rather than merely predict the next screen action. However, much of the current mobile-agent literature still evaluates agents primarily as GUI controllers that observe a screen, emit taps and swipes, and are scored by target app state. Real phone-use tasks are broader: they require deciding when to use app GUIs, device-side commands, or structured tools, while leaving evidence that the intended side effect actually occurred. We introduce PhoneHarness, a mixed-action benchmark and execution harness for studying phone-use agents on verifiable mobile workflows. PhoneHarness runs a device-side agent loop over GUI, CLI, and host-side tool actions, combining deterministic action routing with bounded GUI delegation and auditable execution traces. Its benchmark, PhoneHarness Bench, evaluates whether agents complete tasks with observable side effects, not only whether they produce plausible final answers. On the annotated evaluation split, PhoneHarness reaches a 75.0% pass rate, outperforming the strongest non-PhoneHarness settings by 12.9 percentage points. PhoneHarness and PhoneHarness Bench therefore play distinct but mutually dependent roles: the harness makes mixed phone workflows executable, while the benchmark measures whether agents can use that harness reliably and safely. Our findings suggest that reliable phone automation depends on action-surface routing and verifiable execution, not only visual GUI control.
| Comments: | Project Page: this https URL |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2606.14832 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2606.14832v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.14832
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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