arXiv:2607. 26769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models increasingly use sketches, annotations, tools, and intermediate images during reasoning, but it remains unclear whether they truly rely on these visual states.
By Siyu Yan, Zhuoran Yan, Haiying Xu, Panhao Zhou, Jingyu Chen, Chenhao Ji, Shuo Cao, Yongheng Zhang, Haoze Liu, Siyu Zhang, Xiwen Gu, Yihao Liu, Alex Jinpeng Wang
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. 08907v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Thinking with images allows a multimodal model to compensate for limited perception by invoking visual tools through code.
By Delin Mao, Chenghao Sun, Jingwei Song, Chishui Chen, Linfeng Zhang
arXiv:2606. 00096v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual agents employ external visual tools within visual chains of thought to incorporate fine-grained evidence.
By Dong-Hee Kim, Reuben Tan, Donghyun Kim
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.
By Changhao Xiang, Shilin Zhang, Zheng Ma, Kanzhi Cheng, Ruize Ma, Yi Feng, Jianbing Zhang, Zhi Wang, Zhen Wu, Xinyu Dai, Lewei Lu
arXiv:2604. 14888v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in vision language models (VLMs) offer reasoning capabilities, yet how these unfold and integrate visual and textual information remains unclear.
By Danae S\'anchez Villegas, Samuel Lewis-Lim, Nikolaos Aletras, Desmond Elliott
arXiv:2607. 16311v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) often answer visual questions using learned language and category priors rather than grounding their predictions in the image itself.
By Jingyu Sun, Jiachen Tu, Yuyang Xue, Yaoxin Jiang, Guoyi Xu, Zhengtao Yao, Rui Qian, Yizheng Sun, Hongpeng Zhou, Jingyuan Sun, Yan Lin
arXiv:2606. 02735v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalization remains a central bottleneck for vision-language-action (VLA) models: under distractors, appearance shifts, and semantically similar tasks, the policy must often infer local execution details from coarse instructions while also deciding which parts of the image matter for control.
By Yueh-Hua Wu, Tatsuya Matsushima, Kei Ota
arXiv:2607. 25467v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stateful multimodal assistants encode an image once but may answer questions about it many turns later.
By Hong Chen, Kang Chen, Yuxuan Fan, Bo Wang, Yubo Gao, Yuanlin Chu, Xuming Hu
arXiv:2607. 15565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Where should the question go in a vision-language model (VLM) prompt: before the image or after it?
By Rakshanda Hassan Abhinandan, John Galeotti, Deva Ramanan, Gautam Rajendrakumar Gare
arXiv:2606. 19965v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly expected to act on visual information, yet the same scene may require different actions under different task contexts.
By Yihao Wang, Zijian He, Jie Ren, Keze Wang
arXiv:2605. 18740v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still struggle with fine-grained visual understanding, where answers often depend on small but decisive evidence in the full image.
By Qianhao Yuan, Jie Lou, Xing Yu, Hongyu Lin, Le Sun, Xianpei Han, Yaojie Lu