Tool-Using Vision-Language Agents

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) frequently misread values, hallucinate details, and confuse overlapping elements in charts. Current approaches rely solely on pixel interpretation, creating a Pixel-Only Bottleneck: agents treat interactive charts as static images, losing access to the structured specification that encodes exact values. We introduce Introspective and Interactive Visual Grounding (IVG), a framework that combines (1) spec-grounded introspection, which queries the underlying specification for deterministic evidence, with (2) view-grounded interaction, which manipulates the view to resolve visual ambiguity. To enable evaluation without VLM bias, we present iPlotBench, a benchmark of 500 interactive Plotly figures with 6,706 binary questions and ground-truth specifications. Experiments show that introspection improves data reconstruction fidelity, while the combination with interaction achieves the highest QA accuracy (0.81), with +6.7 % gains on overlapping geometries. We further demonstrate IVG in deployed agents that explore data autonomously and collaborate with human users in real time.

Training multimodal agents via reinforcement learning for knowledge-intensive visual reasoning is fundamentally hindered by the extreme sparsity of outcome-based supervision and the unpredictability of live web environments. To resolve these algorithmic and environmental bottlenecks, we introduce ProMMSearchAgent, establishing a novel Sim-to-Real training paradigm for multimodal search. We decouple policy learning into a deterministic, local static sandbox. Crucially, to learn effectively within this constrained environment, we propose an introspective process-oriented reward. By probing the agent's own parametric knowledge boundaries, we generate dense behavioral metadata that explicitly rewards the correct cognitive decision, initiating a multimodal or text search only when visually or factually uncertain. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our locally-trained policy transfers zero-shot to the live Google Search API. ProMMSearchAgent achieves new SOTA performance, outperforming MMSearch-R1 by +5.1% on FVQA-test, +6.3% on InfoSeek, and +11.3% on MMSearch.

Presentation slides are a primary medium for data-driven reporting, yet keeping complex, analytics-style decks up to date remains labor-intensive. Existing automation methods mostly follow fixed template filling and cannot support dynamic updates for diverse, user-authored slide decks. We therefore define "Dynamic Slide Update via Natural Language Instructions on User-provided Templates" and introduce DynaSlide, a large-scale benchmark with 20,036 real-world instruction-execution triples (source slide, user instruction, target slide) grounded in a shared external database and built from business reporting slides under bring-your-own-template (BYO-template) conditions. To tackle this task, we propose SlideAgent, an agent-based framework that combines multimodal slide parsing, natural language instruction grounding, and tool-augmented reasoning for tables, charts, and textual conclusions. SlideAgent updates content while preserving layout and style, providing a strong reference baseline on DynaSlide. We further design end-to-end and component-level evaluation protocols that reveal key challenges and opportunities for future research. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/XiaoZhou2024/SlideAgent.

Small Vision-Language Models (SVLMs) are efficient task controllers but often suffer from visual brittleness and poor tool orchestration. They typically require expensive supervised trajectory tuning to mitigate these deficits. In this work, we propose Self-supervised Perception Enabled by Cascaded Tool Rollout Alignment (SPECTRA), a supervision-free framework that bootstraps agentic capabilities via Coldstart Reinforcement Learning for SVLMs. SPECTRA enforces Soft Structured Multi-turn Rollouts, a topological constraint that directs agents to explicitly sequence tool derived evidence before synthesis, effectively grounding reasoning in visual observations. We employ a multi-objective reward signal that simultaneously maximizes task correctness, rollout structure, and tool utility, enabling agent to self-discover robust behaviors without human preference labels. We further introduce Tool Instrumental Utility (TIU), a novel metric to quantify tool efficacy in the absence of ground truth. Extensive evaluations across composite and out-of-distribution (MMMU-Pro) benchmarks demonstrate that SPECTRA boosts agentic trajectories, improving task accuracy by up to 5% and tool efficiency by 9%, enabling more efficient multimodal agents that learn effectively from environmental interaction alone.

Vision-language models (VLM) have markedly advanced AI-driven interpretation and reporting of complex medical imaging, such as computed tomography (CT). Yet, existing methods largely relegate clinicians to passive observers of final outputs, offering no interpretable reasoning trace for them to inspect, validate, or refine. To address this, we introduce RadAgent, a tool-using AI agent that generates CT reports through a stepwise and interpretable process. Each resulting report is accompanied by a fully inspectable trace of intermediate decisions and tool interactions, allowing clinicians to examine how the reported findings are derived. In our experiments, we observe that RadAgent improves chest CT report generation over its 3D VLM counterpart, CT-Chat, across three dimensions. Clinical accuracy improves by 5.8 points (35.4% relative) in macro-F1 and 5.1 points (18.6% relative) in micro-F1. Robustness under adversarial conditions improves by 24.7 points (41.9% relative). Furthermore, RadAgent achieves 37.0% in faithfulness, a new capability entirely absent in its 3D VLM counterpart. By structuring the interpretation of chest CT as an explicit, tool-augmented and iterative reasoning trace, RadAgent brings us closer toward transparent and reliable AI for radiology.

Vision-language agents that orchestrate specialized tools for image restoration (IR) have emerged as a promising method, yet most existing frameworks operate in a training-free manner. They rely on heuristic task scheduling and exhaustive tool traversal, resulting in sub-optimal restoration paths and prohibitive computational cost. We argue that the core bottleneck lies in the absence of a learned policy to make decision, as a vision-language model cannot efficiently handle degradation-aware task ordering and tool composition. To this end, we propose TIR-Agent, a trainable image restoration agent that performs a direct tool-calling policy through a two-stage training pipeline of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL). Two key designs underpin effective RL training: (i) a random perturbation strategy applied to the SFT data, which broadens the policy's exploration over task schedules and tool compositions, and (ii) a multi-dimensional adaptive reward mechanism that dynamically re-weights heterogeneous image quality metrics to mitigate reward hacking. To support high-throughput, asynchronous GPU-based tool invocation during training, we further develop a globally shared model-call pool. Experiments on both in-domain and out-of-domain degradations show that TIR-Agent outperforms 12 baselines, including 6 all-in-one models, 3 training-free agents, and 3 proprietary models, and achieves over 2.5$\times$ inference speedup by eliminating redundant tool executions.

Recent progress in multimodal reasoning has enabled agents that interpret imagery, connect it with language, and execute structured analytical tasks. Extending these capabilities to remote sensing remains challenging, as models must reason over spatial scale, geographic structures, and multispectral indices while maintaining coherent multi-step logic. To address this gap, we introduce \textit{OpenEarthAgent}, a unified framework for tool-augmented geospatial reasoning trained on satellite imagery, natural-language queries, and structured reasoning traces. Beyond serving as a benchmark, OpenEarthAgent establishes a cohesive agentic architecture built around a unified executable tool registry and trajectory-based policy learning. The framework standardizes heterogeneous visual, spectral, GIS, and georeferenced raster operations under a consistent callable schema, enabling modular orchestration and deterministic execution. Training is performed via supervised fine-tuning on structured reasoning trajectories with deterministic replay validation to ensure executability and spatial correctness. The accompanying corpus comprises 14,538 training and 1,169 evaluation instances with over 107K reasoning steps, spanning urban, environmental, disaster, and infrastructure domains and incorporating GIS operations alongside index analyses such as NDVI, NBR, and NDBI. Grounded in explicit reasoning traces, the learned agent demonstrates structured reasoning, stable spatial understanding, and interpretable tool-driven behaviour across diverse EO scenarios. We report consistent improvements over a strong baseline and competitive performance against recent open and closed-source models. Our code, data and trained models are publicly available: https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/OpenEarthAgent

The advent of always-on personal AI assistants, enabled by all-day wearable devices such as smart glasses, demands a new level of contextual understanding, one that goes beyond short, isolated events to encompass the continuous, longitudinal stream of egocentric video. Achieving this vision requires advances in long-horizon video understanding, where systems must interpret and recall visual and audio information spanning days or even weeks. Existing methods, including large language models and retrieval-augmented generation, are constrained by limited context windows and lack the ability to perform compositional, multi-hop reasoning over very long video streams. In this work, we address these challenges through EGAgent, an enhanced agentic framework centered on entity scene graphs, which represent people, places, objects, and their relationships over time. Our system equips a planning agent with tools for structured search and reasoning over these graphs, as well as hybrid visual and audio search capabilities, enabling detailed, cross-modal, and temporally coherent reasoning. Experiments on the EgoLifeQA and Video-MME (Long) datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on EgoLifeQA (57.5%) and competitive performance on Video-MME (Long) (74.1%) for complex longitudinal video understanding tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/egagent.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in multimodal reasoning. However, they can have spatial blindness and logical hallucinations when interpreting densely structured engineering content, such as analog circuit schematics. To address these challenges, we propose a Vision Language Model-Optimized Collaborative Agent Design Workflow for Analog Circuit Sizing (VLM-CAD) designed to support step-by-step reasoning over multimodal evidence. VLM-CAD bridges the modality gap by integrating a neuro-symbolic structural parsing module, Image2Net, which transforms raw pixels into explicit topological graphs and structured JSON representations to anchor VLM interpretation in deterministic facts. To ensure the reliability required for engineering decisions, we further propose ExTuRBO, an Explainable Trust Region Bayesian Optimization method. ExTuRBO employs agent-generated semantic seeds to warm-start local searches and uses Automatic Relevance Determination to provide sensitivity evidence for the final design report. Experimental results on 12 sizing tasks covering six circuits and four technology platforms show that VLM-CAD achieves a pooled Strict Pass@1 of 23.3% and a Relaxed Pass@1 of 91.7%, while providing sensitivity evidence for final design reports.

Designing or learning robot policies that generalize zero-shot across a range of language instructions and objects is a core problem in robotics. Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) learn such policies end-to-end by repurposing existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but generalization to new instructions and objects remains challenging. An alternative is to implement a modular policy by leveraging an explicit VLM-based 3D scene representation and motion planning. While modular policies show strong zero-shot potential, they typically retrieve objects based on semantics without explicit spatial reasoning, severely restricting their overall grounding capabilities. They also interact with objects using basic grasping and navigation skills. In this work, we address these limitations by unifying grounding capabilities and robot skills in a single agentic action space through a scene-agent tool interface. By leveraging part-level affordances, our skills generalize across diverse objects and enable zero-shot interactions such as unplugging chargers and opening drawers. We name the resulting framework Agentic Scene Policies (ASP). Through extensive real-world experiments, we show how ASP consistently outperforms leading VLAs in the zero-shot setting. We also demonstrate the extensibility of our framework by introducing a mobile version of ASP to tackle room-level queries. See our project page (https://montrealrobotics.ca/agentic-scene-policies.github.io/) for more results.

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promise for remote sensing tasks such as visual question answering and scene understanding. However, existing models remain limited to basic instruction-following and struggle with real-world scenarios that require multi-source data integration, fine-grained spatial reasoning, and domain expertise. To address this gap, we propose RS-Agent, a domain-adapted intelligent agent that connects user intent with professional remote sensing workflows through structured task planning and tool orchestration. RS-Agent consists of four components aligned with typical remote sensing workflows: a Central Controller for intent understanding and process planning, a dynamic toolkit for tool execution, a Solution Space for task-specific expert guidance, and a Knowledge Space for domain knowledge support. We further introduce Task-Aware Retrieval, which improves planning by identifying task types and retrieving expert-defined solutions, and DualRAG, a weighted dual-path retrieval-augmented generation method that enhances the relevance and completeness of retrieved knowledge. RS-Agent natively supports multiple imaging modalities, including optical and SAR imagery, and can automatically organize dedicated SAR processing tools into executable workflows. Experiments on 9 datasets and 18 remote sensing tasks show that RS-Agent significantly outperforms state-of-the-art MLLMs, achieving over 95% task planning accuracy and strong results in scene classification, object counting, and remote sensing visual question answering. These results demonstrate the value of combining LLM reasoning with remote sensing expertise for intelligent geospatial analysis.