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GUIWatcher: Automatically Detecting GUI Lags by Analyzing Mobile Application Screencasts

2025· article· en· W4413360522 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicMobile and Web Applications
Canadian institutionsQueen's UniversityConcordia University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsComputer scienceMobile deviceComputer graphics (images)Artificial intelligenceWorld Wide Web

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The Graphical User Interface (GUI) plays a central role in mobile applications, directly affecting usability and user satisfaction. Poor GUI performance, such as lag or unresponsiveness, can lead to negative user experience and decreased mobile application (app) ratings. In this paper, we present GUIWatcher, a framework designed to detect GUI lags by analyzing screencasts recorded during mobile app testing. GUIWatcher uses computer vision techniques to identify three types of lag-inducing frames (i.e., janky frames, long loading frames, and frozen frames) and prioritizes the most severe ones that significantly impact user experience. Our approach was evaluated using real-world mobile application tests, achieving high accuracy in detecting GUI lags in screencasts, with an average precision of 0.91 and recall of 0.96. The comprehensive bug reports generated from the lags detected by GUIWatcher help developers focus on the more critical issues and debug them efficiently. Additionally, GUIWatcher has been deployed in a real-world production environment, continuously monitoring app performance and successfully identifying critical GUI performance issues. By offering a practical solution for identifying and addressing GUI lags, GUIWatcher contributes to enhancing user satisfaction and the overall quality of mobile apps.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Other design · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.867
Threshold uncertainty score0.477

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.005
GPT teacher head0.260
Teacher spread0.255 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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