arXiv AI

ToolGate: Token-Efficient Pre-Call Control for Tool-Augmented Vision-Language Agents

arXiv:2606. 03054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-augmented vision-language agents can acquire external perceptual evidence through OCR, detection, segmentation, and other tools, but executing every proposed tool call is costly and sometimes unnecessary.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

Less Language, More Latents: Annotation-Efficient VLAs for Driving

The paper introduces Latent Action Driving Annotations (LADA), a three‑stage pipeline that converts large amounts of unlabelled observation‑trajectory data into a language‑conditioned driving model. First, a latent action model with a vector‑quantised bottleneck learns a compact codebook of vehicle intents. Then, a small set of language‑annotated examples trains a vision‑language translator to map observations and instructions into this codebook, and finally a VLA is trained on observation‑latent‑action pairs across the full corpus. Using less than 5% of language annotations, LADA attains a Driving Score of 87.98 and a Success Rate of 70.46% on Bench2Drive, matching or surpassing fully supervised baselines.

By Alexey Zakharov, Kemal Oksuz, Puneet K. Dokania
arXiv AI
Jun 2

VLM4VLA: Revisiting Vision-Language-Models in Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2601. 03309v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, which integrate pretrained large Vision-Language Models (VLM) into their policy backbone, are gaining significant attention for their promising generalization capabilities.

By Jianke Zhang, Xiaoyu Chen, Qiuyue Wang, Mingsheng Li, Yanjiang Guo, Yucheng Hu, Jiajun Zhang, Shuai Bai, Junyang Lin, Jianyu Chen
arXiv AI
Jul 9

VOTE: Vision-Language-Action Optimization with Trajectory Ensemble Voting

arXiv:2507. 05116v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent large-scale Vision Language Action (VLA) models have shown superior performance in robotic manipulation tasks guided by natural language.

By Juyi Lin, Amir Taherin, Arash Akbari, Arman Akbari, Lei Lu, Guangyu Chen, Taskin Padir, Xiaomeng Yang, Weiwei Chen, Yiqian Li, Xue Lin, David Kaeli, Pu Zhao, Yanzhi Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Making Every Tool Call Count: Necessary Tool-Evidence Path Rewards for Agentic Vision-Language Models

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.

By Xingming Long, Yu Liu, Zhiwei Yang, Hanqi Feng, Shaojie Zhang, Barnabas Poczos, Chao Jiang, Zhenbo Luo, Lei Jiang, Pei Fu
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

LookStep: Efficient Vision-Language Navigation with Linguistic Foresight and Event Driven Memory

LookStep is a new end‑to‑end framework for Vision‑Language Navigation that integrates Language‑Centric Future State Modeling with an Event‑Driven Rolling Memory. It uses language labels to predict coarse navigation progress and future states for candidate actions, and autonomously decides which observations to store in a bounded memory with semantic roles. Empirical results show that LookStep outperforms existing methods on VLN‑CE tasks, achieving a 49.7% success rate on R2R‑CE Val‑Unseen while improving memory efficiency and reducing data requirements.

By Kun-Yang Yu, Yingzhe Li, Hongyu Xu, Shi-Yu Tian, Zhi Zhou, Yang Chen, Ming Yang, Sheng Wang, Qing Yu, Lan-Zhe Guo, Yu-Feng Li
arXiv AI
Sep 3

UniToolCall: Unifying Tool-Use Representation, Data, and Evaluation for LLM Agents

UniToolCall introduces a unified framework for tool-use in large language model agents, standardizing toolset construction, dataset generation, and evaluation. The framework aggregates over 22,000 tools and creates a hybrid training corpus of more than 390,000 instances by combining ten public datasets with synthetically generated, structurally controlled trajectories. It models diverse interaction patterns—single‑hop vs. multi‑hop, single‑turn vs. multi‑turn, serial vs. parallel execution—and adds an Anchor Linkage mechanism to enforce cross‑turn dependencies, while converting seven public benchmarks into a common Query–Action–Observation–Answer format for fine‑grained evaluation.

By Yijuan Liang, Xinghao Chen, Yifan Ge, Ziyi Wu, Hao Wu, Changyu Zeng, Wei Xing, Xiaoyu Shen
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

What do VLM-Based Vision-Language Navigation Models Rely on: Interpreting and Steering Policy Behavior

arXiv:2609.24576v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) models rely mostly on pre-trained large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to predict navigation actions. While th...

By D\'ebora Oliveira Makowski, Samiran Gode, Abhijeet Nayak, Marco Hutter, Cordelia Schmid, Lukas Rosenberger Schmid, Wolfram Burgard
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Benchmarking and Boosting Multilingual Capabilities of LVLMs via OCR-Centric Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces PM4Bench, a multimodal, multilingual, multi-task benchmark built on a strictly parallel 10‑language corpus, allowing fair cross‑lingual comparison of Large Vision‑Language Models (LVLMs). It also proposes a vision setting that embeds textual inputs directly into images to better mimic real deployment scenarios. Experiments show OCR performance drives cross‑lingual gaps, leading to an OCR‑centric GRPO training strategy that improves multilingual VQA and reduces disparities without costly supervision.

By Junyuan Gao, Jiahe Song, Jiang Wu, Runchuan Zhu, Guanlin Shen, Shasha Wang, Xingjian Wei, Haote Yang, Weijia Li, Bin Wang, Lijun Wu, Conghui He