Beacon is a new agentic visual reasoning model that improves multimodal large language models (MLLMs) by better deciding when to use tools and how to use them. It introduces two key concepts—Mode Adaptiveness, which ensures tools are invoked only when necessary, and Tool Effect, which measures the net benefit of tool use— and trains the model with supervised fine‑tuning and reinforcement learning that rewards necessity-aware decisions and expands capability through expert hints. Across 13 benchmarks, Beacon outperforms other open‑source models, achieving the highest average score and the largest net tool‑gain on diagnostic tests.
By Qixun Wang, Yang Shi, Letian Cheng, Zhuoran Zhang, Yan He, Yuqi Tang, Qi Zhang, Xinlei Yu, Ruizhe Chen, Tianrun Xu, Yuanxing Zhang, Pengfei Wan, Haotian Wang, Xianghua Ying
VBVR-Pro is a closed‑loop testbed that enables native visual reasoning through generation, offering 300 procedurally generated tasks that scale training and allow strong transfer to external benchmarks. It supplies verifiable reward scorers based on deterministic, task‑specific rules, outperforming VLM‑as‑a‑judge approaches and providing reliable signals for reinforcement learning. The suite also facilitates controlled modality studies, revealing that video generation excels at persistent spatiotemporal tracking while interleaved generation offers a compute‑efficient alternative, and highlights the importance of vision‑native trajectories for reasoning.
By Junxiang Xu, Ruisi Wang, Fanyi Pu, Maijunxian Wang, Ran Ji, Tongxi Zhou, Chenyang Gu, Jing Zuo, Hongcan Xiao, Yimeng Geng, Wanqi Yin, Wei Chen, Oscar Qian, Zhengan Yan, Ziqi Huang, Haiwen Diao, Liang Pan, Bo Li, Xiangyu Fan, Dezhi Luo, Fengyuan Yu, Zehong Zhao, Qingying Gao, Tinghui Zhu, Yilan Zhang, Jingqi Tong, Pinyuan Feng, Zhengze Jiang, Letian Wang, Ziyu Guo, Renrui Zhang, Jieneng Chen, Sonia Joseph, Constantin Venhoff, Saman Motamed, Mengyue Yang, Chandra Sripada, Alan Yuille, Philip Torr, Lvmin Zhang, Vikash Kumar, Daniel Khashabi, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Rapha\"el Milli\`ere, Vincent C. M\"uller, Anyi Rao, Quan Wang, Ziwei Liu, Dahua Lin, Lei Yang, Hokin Deng, Zhongang Cai
arXiv:2607. 12815v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely used as a test-time scaling strategy for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but it remains unclear what is extended when VLMs generate longer reasoning traces.
By Hiroto Osaka, Shohei Taniguchi, Gouki Minegishi, Kai Yamashita, Masahiro Suzuki, Yutaka Matsuo
arXiv:2607.28225v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Agentic vision-language models (VLMs), which interleave textual reasoning with explicit tool calls such as cropping and code-based image manipulati...
By Haoqing Wang, Xingrun Xing, Ziheng Li, Jianyuan Guo, Yehui Tang
arXiv:2606. 30185v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Improving vision-language models (VLMs) on visual reasoning typically requires retraining or hand-designed prompts and tools.
By Yutao Sun, Yanting Miao, Hao-Xuan Ma, Mengyu Zhou, Mingshuai Chen, Tiancheng Zhao, Dexin Wang, Lei Lv, Li Xu, Xiaoxi Jiang, Guanjun Jiang
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
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely used as a test-time scaling strategy for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but it remains unclear what is extended when VLMs generate longer reasoning traces. We ask whether CoT requires continued access to image tokens, or whether it mainly operates over visual information already made available earlier in the forward pass.
arXiv:2604. 09508v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (VRAG) empowers Vision-Language Models to retrieve and reason over visually rich documents.
By Yucheng Shen, Jiulong Wu, Jizhou Huang, Dawei Yin, Lingyong Yan, Min Cao
arXiv:2609.09985v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Real-world video understanding requires integrating visual, audio, textual, and temporal evidence distributed across a video. Yet many pipelines use a...
By Sheng Li, Peng Liu, Qianqian Zhang, Tiancheng Zhao
OmniHarness is a framework that enables generalizable visual generation by learning symbolic policies from verified executions. It abstracts shared procedures and applicability conditions, allowing these policies to be instantiated, adapted, and composed for new tasks while keeping model parameters fixed. The system uses intermediate verification for refinement, self-directed inquiry to generate practice tasks, and continuous feedback to expand capabilities, achieving strong results on multiple benchmarks and outperforming baselines on Creative tasks.
By Xu Xu (Beihang University), Jinxiu Liu (The Chinese University of Hong Kong), Zhangbo Qiao (Beihang University), Jiaxing Lu (Beihang University), Xiangyu Zhang (Beihang University), Yubin Gu (National University of Singapore), Fangwei Ning (Beihang University), Yan Shi (Beihang University)
arXiv:2606. 12830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While recent vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong multimodal understanding, they remain limited in spatial reasoning tasks that require active evidence acquisition and multi-step visual interaction.
By Changye Li, Meng Lu, Yi Wu, Ligeng Zhu
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