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: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?
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.
arXiv:2608. 06270v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The "thinking-with-images" paradigm equips multimodal LLMs with active visual operations such as crop-and-zoom.
arXiv:2606. 00096v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual agents employ external visual tools within visual chains of thought to incorporate fine-grained evidence.