With Tools or Because of Tools? Tracing Capability Gains in Multimodal Agents
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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arXiv:2606. 02357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-augmented multimodal agents show strong benchmark gains, often taken as evidence that agents have learned to use tools.
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.
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...
ATP‑Bench proposes a new benchmark for evaluating agentic tool planning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that generate interleaved text-and-image responses. The benchmark contains 7,702 QA pairs, including 1,592 visual‑question‑answer pairs, across eight categories and 25 visual‑critical intents, all verified by humans. A Multi‑Agent MLLM‑as‑a‑Judge (MAM) system is introduced to assess tool‑call precision, missed opportunities, and overall response quality without relying on ground‑truth references.
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.
arXiv:2601. 02854v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As an agent-level reasoning and coordination paradigm, Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) orchestrates multiple agents through structured debate to improve answer quality and support complex reasoning.