AI 终于学会说“这题我自己能行”
现在的多模态 AI 遇到难题就乱调工具,简单题也硬要“秀操作”,结果又慢又容易错。这篇论文给 AI 装了个“自知之明”:先判断这题到底需不需要外部工具,需要才调用,不需要就自己答;同时用强化学习专门训练它在最难的题上把工具用出真效果。结果整体准确率更高,该用工具时用得更准,不该用时也不再添乱。它不是你明天就能用上的功能,但这是 AI 从“什么都要查”走向“知道什么时候该查”的关键一步。
📄 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.