ECHOES: Seeing Beyond the Current Image via Recursive History Compression and Privileged On-Policy Distillation

Long-horizon GUI agents rely on visual history to maintain task states, but retaining historical screenshots increases visual-token usage and inference costs, while textual summaries can discard critical state information, undermining long-horizon reliability. We propose ECHOES, which leverages training-time privileged information to guide textual history compression and strengthen long-horizon reasoning. Specifically, ECHOES adopts a Compression–Think–Answer (CTA) format to recursively update a textual history state and reason. The same model, given privileged multi-image inputs, serves as a teacher that provides dense token-level on-policy distillation on student-generated CTA rollouts. Our Perception–Memory Fidelity (PMF) Gap-guided OPD–RL framework dynamically balances privileged distillation and task-reward optimization, with periodic teacher updates supporting continued improvement. We further introduce ECHOESBMK, a fine-grained diagnostic benchmark derived from real GUI agent failure trajectories to jointly evaluate visual perception and cross-modal state retention. Experiments on four GUI benchmarks and ECHOESBMK demonstrate substantial gains in task performance and memory fidelity. Without retaining historical screenshots at deployment, ECHOES achieves competitive performance with a favorable performance–inference-cost trade-off and exhibits positive zero-shot transfer to unseen visual planning tasks.