Visual tool use has emerged as a fundamental capability for multimodal agents to actively acquire evidence beyond a fixed image encoding. The prevailing recipe learns this capability from teacher-generated trajectories filtered for answer correctness, implicitly assuming that every successful demonstration provides effective supervision.
arXiv:2608. 08557v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual tool use has emerged as a fundamental capability for multimodal agents to actively acquire evidence beyond a fixed image encoding.
arXiv:2609.36838v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual agents solve problems by interleaving reasoning with image operations, and on-policy distillation (OPD) provides guidance from a strong teache...
arXiv:2608. 08907v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Thinking with images allows a multimodal model to compensate for limited perception by invoking visual tools through code.
arXiv:2604. 04917v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: What does it take to build a visual reasoner that works across charts, science, spatial understanding, and open-ended tasks?
The paper introduces the Necessary Tool‑Evidence Path (NTEP) annotation scheme and its associated reward mechanism (NTEP‑R) to better supervise vision‑language models that use external tools. By explicitly specifying which evidence is needed and penalizing redundant tool calls, the authors train an 8B‑parameter model that shows improved accuracy and tool‑use efficiency across seven image‑grounded benchmarks. The approach demonstrates that fine‑grained supervision of tool‑evidence paths is essential for robust agentic VLM performance.
arXiv:2603. 12056v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimodal agents can now tackle complex reasoning tasks with diverse tools, yet they still suffer from inefficient tool use and inflexible orchestration in open-ended settings.
arXiv:2512. 11995v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While many vision-language models (VLMs) are developed to answer well-defined, straightforward questions with highly specified targets, as in most benchmarks, they often struggle in practice with complex open-ended tasks, which usually require multiple rounds of exploration and reasoning in the visual space.
arXiv:2605. 13527v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reusable skills have become a core substrate for improving agent capabilities, yet most existing skill packages encode reusable behavior primarily as textual prompts, executable code, or learned routines.
arXiv:2606. 29984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) is an important paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs).
Recent advances in multimodal generative models have enabled instruction-based image generation to move beyond semantic manipulation to knowledge-driven visual reasoning. However, these methods focus on explicit commonsense reasoning, shallow causal understanding, and direct knowledge recall, failing at knowledge-intensive generation.
arXiv:2606. 17888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has extended from purely linguistic domains to multimodal scenarios; however, existing approaches often treat visual inputs as homogeneous or auxiliary signals, failing to capture the intricate and sample-specific dependencies between text and images in mathematical problem-solving.
arXiv:2606. 05718v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) improves reasoning by training a student on trajectories sampled from its own policy under supervision from a teacher.