Chain-of-Ground: Improving GUI Grounding via Iterative Reasoning and Reference Feedback

Abstract: GUI grounding aims to align natural language instructions with precise regions in complex user interfaces. Advanced multimodal LLMs show strong ability in visual GUI grounding but still struggle with small or visually similar targets and ambiguity in real world layouts. These limitations arise from limited grounding capacity and from underuse of existing reasoning potential. We present Chain of Ground CoG a training free multi step grounding framework that uses multimodal LLMs for iterative visual reasoning and refinement. Instead of direct prediction the model progressively reflects and adjusts its hypotheses leading to more accurate and interpretable localization. Our approach achieves 68.4 accuracy on the ScreenSpot Pro benchmark an improvement of 4.8 points. To measure real world generalization we introduce TPanel UI a dataset of 420 labeled industrial control panels with visual distortions such as blur and masking. On TPanel UI Chain of Ground improves over the strong baseline Qwen3 VL 235B by 6.9 points showing the effectiveness of multi step training free grounding across real world and digital interfaces. These results highlight a direction for unlocking grounding potential through structured iterative refinement instead of additional training.