CausalCache: Conditional High-Fidelity Restoration for Long-Horizon GUI Agents

Abstract

Long-horizon GUI agents can retain complete action histories as compact text, but only a few historical screenshots fit in active context. We formulate this as budgeted fidelity restoration: every event remains summarized, while a fixed budget $B$ determines which events regain their archived screenshots. Recent-$B$ assigns all visual slots to the latest events. CausalCache instead scores the complete history and swaps in an older event only when its predicted utility exceeds that of a recent event. A history-gated key/value adapter modifies only restored history-image tokens and is exactly bypassed when no history image is active, preserving current-screen processing. The adapter and selector are trained with matched-budget interventions on desktop trajectories and evaluated zero-shot on mobile. On OSWorld-Verified, activating historical screenshots improves success by about $13$ percentage points over summary-only memory. Under the official $15$-step limit, CausalCache and Recent-$4$ are statistically indistinguishable; in a $30$-step diagnostic, CausalCache achieves $46.7\%$ success versus $42.4\%$ ($+4.3$ points). Zero-shot on $117$ MobileWorld tasks, CausalCache improves over Recent-$4$ from $30.2\%$ to $36.8\%$. The gain is concentrated on a pre-defined cross-app memory-candidate split ($30.6\%$ vs. $19.4\%$, $+11.2$ points), while single-app controls show no detectable difference ($43.6\%$ vs. $42.4\%$). These results show that selecting which past events regain pixels is more effective than spending a fixed visual budget entirely on recency.