Visual CoT agents exhibit tool-use collapse where tool usage declines but task accuracy rises, and adding entropy regularization for rollout diversity produces the strongest performance.
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Reinforced visual perception with tools
14 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
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abstract
Visual reasoning, a cornerstone of human intelligence, encompasses complex perceptual and logical processes essential for solving diverse visual problems. While advances in computer vision have produced powerful models for various perceptual tasks, leveraging these for general visual reasoning remains challenging. Prior work demonstrates that augmenting LLMs with vision models via supervised finetuning improves performance, but faces key limitations such as expensive data generation, reliance on careful data filtering, and poor generalization. To address these issues, we propose ReVPT to enhance multi-modal LLMs' abilities to reason about and use visual tools through reinforcement learning. We introduce a novel RL algorithm based on GRPO, designed to train models to reason with a suite of four visual tools. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several perception-heavy benchmarks, including SAT, CV-Bench, BLINK and MMStar, significantly outperforming the supervised and text-based RL finetuning baselines. Notably, Our ReVPT-3B and ReVPT-7B outperform the instruct models by 9.03% and 9.44% on CV-Bench. Finally, we bring to the community new insights on RL-based visual tool-usage through extensive ablations. Our code is available at https://github.com/ls-kelvin/REVPT.
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A reinforcement-learned vision-language agent adaptively selects and fuses monocular depth experts per sample for better performance across camera geometries.
Proposes an equation-anchored tool-use method for MLLMs that writes the pinhole back-projection equation in Chain-of-Thought and substitutes retrieved camera intrinsics and depths to achieve robustness in 3D object detection and visual grounding under rescaled intrinsics.
Modeling sparse visual state updates instead of full images cuts generated visual tokens ~55.6% and improves interleaved multimodal reasoning over full-image ULMMs.
DR-MV3D decomposes MV3D-VQA into global map construction, question-conditioned view planning, and egocentric grounding, supervised by global consistency and local trajectory rewards optimized via GRPO.
VESTA introduces dynamic tool creation for VLMs that outperforms static-tool and no-tool baselines on distribution fitting, time series, and astronomy tasks in the new DAWN benchmark.
InterSketch improves long-horizon visual-textual chain-of-thought in VLMs by dynamically generating and interleaving self-correcting visual sketches with text, using a synthesized dataset plus reflection in cold-start followed by stepwise-reward RL, and reports outperforming Gemini-3-Pro on benchmar
Latent visual reasoning improves multimodal models via training effects even without using latent tokens at inference, enabled by an attention-based RL reward that promotes interaction with text tokens.
SCOLAR fixes information gain collapse in latent visual reasoning by generating independent auxiliary visual tokens via a detransformer, extending acceptable CoT length over 30x and delivering +14.12% gains on reasoning benchmarks.
ToolsRL trains MLLMs via a tool-specific then accuracy-focused RL curriculum to master visual tools for complex reasoning tasks.
Perception Programs rewrite dense visual tool outputs into language-native summaries, boosting MLLM accuracy by 15-45% absolute on BLINK perception tasks and setting new state-of-the-art results.
LAST augments MLLMs with a tool-abstraction sandbox and three-stage training to deliver around 20% gains on spatial reasoning tasks, outperforming closed-source models.
OmniView-Space framework with MPSM, tool-guided reasoning, and distillation achieves SOTA on spatial reasoning benchmarks for MLLMs while reducing external geometry dependencies.
ForenAgent, an MLLM that writes and runs Python forensics tools over multiple turns, beats prior image-forgery detectors on its new FABench benchmark and on SIDA-Test.
citing papers explorer
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Diversity Over Frequency: Rethinking Tool Use in Visual Chain-of-Thought Agents
Visual CoT agents exhibit tool-use collapse where tool usage declines but task accuracy rises, and adding entropy regularization for rollout diversity produces the strongest performance.
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DepthAgent: Towards Better Universal Depth Estimation via Sample-wise Expert Selection
A reinforcement-learned vision-language agent adaptively selects and fuses monocular depth experts per sample for better performance across camera geometries.
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Towards Camera-Robust 3D Localization: Equation-Anchored Tool-Use for MLLMs
Proposes an equation-anchored tool-use method for MLLMs that writes the pinhole back-projection equation in Chain-of-Thought and substitutes retrieved camera intrinsics and depths to achieve robustness in 3D object detection and visual grounding under rescaled intrinsics.
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DeltaV: Thinking with Visual State Updates in Unified Large Multimodal Models
Modeling sparse visual state updates instead of full images cuts generated visual tokens ~55.6% and improves interleaved multimodal reasoning over full-image ULMMs.
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Dense Reward for Multi-View 3D Reasoning with Global Maps and Local Views
DR-MV3D decomposes MV3D-VQA into global map construction, question-conditioned view planning, and egocentric grounding, supervised by global consistency and local trajectory rewards optimized via GRPO.
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VESTA: Visual Exploration with Statistical Tool Agents
VESTA introduces dynamic tool creation for VLMs that outperforms static-tool and no-tool baselines on distribution fitting, time series, and astronomy tasks in the new DAWN benchmark.
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InterSketch: An Interleaved Reasoning Model with Self-correcting Visual Sketch and Stepwise Reward
InterSketch improves long-horizon visual-textual chain-of-thought in VLMs by dynamically generating and interleaving self-correcting visual sketches with text, using a synthesized dataset plus reflection in cold-start followed by stepwise-reward RL, and reports outperforming Gemini-3-Pro on benchmar
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Leveraging Latent Visual Reasoning in Silence
Latent visual reasoning improves multimodal models via training effects even without using latent tokens at inference, enabled by an attention-based RL reward that promotes interaction with text tokens.
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Self-Consistent Latent Reasoning: Long Latent Sequence Reasoning for Vision-Language Model
SCOLAR fixes information gain collapse in latent visual reasoning by generating independent auxiliary visual tokens via a detransformer, extending acceptable CoT length over 30x and delivering +14.12% gains on reasoning benchmarks.
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Visual Reasoning through Tool-supervised Reinforcement Learning
ToolsRL trains MLLMs via a tool-specific then accuracy-focused RL curriculum to master visual tools for complex reasoning tasks.
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Don't Show Pixels, Show Cues: Unlocking Visual Tool Reasoning in Language Models via Perception Programs
Perception Programs rewrite dense visual tool outputs into language-native summaries, boosting MLLM accuracy by 15-45% absolute on BLINK perception tasks and setting new state-of-the-art results.
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LAST: Leveraging Tools as Hints to Enhance Spatial Reasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models
LAST augments MLLMs with a tool-abstraction sandbox and three-stage training to deliver around 20% gains on spatial reasoning tasks, outperforming closed-source models.
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OmniView-Space: Reinforcing Spatial Reasoning via Multi-Perspective Spatial Mapping
OmniView-Space framework with MPSM, tool-guided reasoning, and distillation achieves SOTA on spatial reasoning benchmarks for MLLMs while reducing external geometry dependencies.
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Code-in-the-Loop Forensics: Agentic Tool Use for Image Forgery Detection
ForenAgent, an MLLM that writes and runs Python forensics tools over multiple turns, beats prior image-forgery detectors on its new FABench benchmark and on SIDA-Test.