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: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.
By Chenrui Fan, Yijun Liang, Shweta Bhardwaj, Kwesi Cobbina, Ming Li, Tianyi Zhou
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?
By Gabriel Sarch, Linrong Cai, Qunzhong Wang, Haoyang Wu, Danqi Chen, Zhuang Liu
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.
By Kangning Zhang, Shuai Shao, Qingyao Li, Jianghao Lin, Lingyue Fu, Shijian Wang, Wenxiang Jiao, Yuan Lu, Weiwen Liu, Weinan Zhang, Yong Yu
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.
By Guanyu Jiang, Zhaochen Su, Xiaoye Qu, Yi R. Fung
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.
By Wanshi Xu, Haokun Zhao, Haidong Yuan, Songjun Cao, Long Ma
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.
By Kanghui Tian, Siyuan Liu, Ziang Yan, Sheng Xia, Shuai Dong, Yi Wang
arXiv:2606. 15753v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied reasoning requires models to perceive task-relevant objects and spaces in physical environments and maintain consistent visual grounding throughout multi-step reasoning.
By Yaoting Huang, Yifu Yuan, Linqi Han, Chengwen Li, Shuoheng Zhang, Xianze Yao, Hongyao Tang, Yan Zheng, Jianye Hao
arXiv:2606. 29984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) is an important paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs).
By Peng, Lee, Yin Zhang, Yanglin Zhang, Haonan Wu, Zishan Liu, Ruoxi Zang, Xin Zhu, Jiayin Zheng, Jian Yao, Zefeng Ji, Fei Ma
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