ReTIME: Learning When and How to Recover GUI Agents from Failures

We present ReTIME, a framework for deciding when and how to recover GUI agents from failures. Recognizing an error does not establish whether recovery should begin immediately: further interaction may reveal useful evidence, but may also propagate the error and consume the remaining execution budget. In a controlled counterfactual study of 120 failed OSWorld trajectories, 78.3% con- tain a later checkpoint with higher recovery utility than the earliest critical error under the same recovery policy and interaction budget. ReTIME addresses this temporal variation with a stateful stopping policy that accumulates failure evi- dence, accounts for ongoing progress, and reserves a budget for recovery. Once intervention is triggered, a learned diagnosis model identifies the current recov- ery need and selects category-specific guidance for the execution agent. We also introduce ReTIME-Bench, comprising 672 checkpoints from 133 failure trajecto- ries, to evaluate intervention timing and recovery diagnosis separately and jointly. ReTIME-8B achieves 56.31% timing balanced accuracy and 31.55% diagnosis accuracy. On OSWorld-Verified, it achieves 35.2% task success under a 50-step budget, compared with 26.8% for its backbone Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct.