arXiv AI
Sep 15

Navigating Sparse Evidence: Agentic Visual RAG via Explicit Context Selection and Consolidation

The paper introduces SCoRE, an agentic framework for Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation that explicitly selects and consolidates visual evidence before generating answers. It addresses two key challenges: sparse, scattered evidence and noisy exploration trajectories that obscure reasoning. By maintaining a textual ledger of relevant observations and reloading original images for a logical evidence sequence, SCoRE decouples reasoning from exploration and enforces strict visual grounding, with training that rewards evidence coverage, compactness, and answer correctness.

By Yucheng Shen, Lingyong Yan, Jiulong Wu, Shuaiqiang Wang, Jianmin WU, Dawei Yin, Min Cao
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 AI
Jun 10

V-REX: Benchmarking Exploratory Visual Reasoning via Chain-of-Questions

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