AI 学会判断何时该用工具,而不是乱用
现在的多模态 AI 遇到难题就爱调工具,结果简单题也被搞砸。这篇研究先量化了这个问题:模型在简单问题上用工具反而引入错误,抵消了它在难题上的收益。他们提出的 Beacon 模型,通过强化学习让 AI 自己判断「这题需不需要工具」,并在最难的题上专门训练工具使用能力,最终在多个基准上既提升了整体表现,又减少了无谓的调用。它不是你明天能用上的东西,但它指出了 AI 工具使用的一个关键短板:不是越强越好,而是知道什么时候不用。
📄 原文摘要(英文)
The fundamental goal of agentic visual reasoning is to improve the success rate of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on complex tasks, rather than merely equipping them with a sophisticated yet inefficient reasoning paradigm. In this work, we rethink agentic visual reasoning through two key dimensions of tool use: Mode Adaptiveness (MA) and Tool Effect (TE). Mode Adaptiveness characterizes whether an MLLM can recognize when tools are truly necessary and invoke them accordingly, thereby avoiding unnecessary computational overhead while improving performance on challenging problems that require tool assistance. Tool Effect characterizes the actual impact of tool use: tools should extend the model's capabilities on problems unsolvable through text-only reasoning, while avoiding additional errors on problems that the model can already solve without tools. We conduct a comprehensive analysis to quantify these two properties and empirically reveal that existing agentic visual reasoning models exhibit limited Mode Adaptiveness, while the gains produced by tool use on hard examples are largely offset by the harm introduced on easy examples that the models can already solve. Motivated by these observations, we propose Beacon, a novel agentic visual reasoning model that achieves stronger overall performance, improved Mode Adaptiveness, and genuine tool-induced performance gains. At the core of Beacon are the Necessity-Aware Adaptive Reward and the Hint-Guided Capability Expansion mechanism in the reinforcement learning stage, which respectively encourage adaptive tool invocation based on task necessity and strengthen the model's tool-use capability on the most challenging problems. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate the strong overall performance of Beacon and its substantial improvements in both Mode Adaptiveness and Tool Effect.