VC-Tooler: Learning Compositional and Adaptive Visual Tool Use

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02217v1
• Date: Mon, 03 Aug 2026 13:38:37 GMT
• Title: VC-Tooler: Learning Compositional and Adaptive Visual Tool Use
• Abstract summary: Agentic multimodal reasoning extends passive image understanding.<n>We present VC-Tooler, which learns visual tool use as a compositional and adaptive capability.
• Score: 45.491241950121214
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Agentic multimodal reasoning extends passive image understanding by allowing VLMs to actively acquire and refine visual evidence through visual tool interactions. Effective visual tool use requires three capabilities: grounding tool calls in visual context, composing tools across multiple steps, and adapting reasoning to tool-returned observations. However, existing approaches largely focus on grounding within fixed tool spaces and rigid invocation patterns, leaving composition and adaptation insufficiently addressed. We present VC-Tooler, which learns visual tool use as a compositional and adaptive capability. To this end, we first build a trajectory bank through a hierarchical synthesis pipeline covering three capability levels: single-tool grounding, multi-tool composition, and diverse tool contexts and interfaces. We then train the model in two stages: a supervised cold start that establishes these capabilities, followed by reinforcement learning that encourages accurate, efficient, and context-aware visual tool use. VC-Tooler achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models on both general-purpose and agentic benchmarks, including $95.8\%$ on V* and $35.3\%$ on VTC-Bench, and shows promising transfer under richer tool settings at inference time. Project page: https://w1zheng.github.io/VC-Tooler

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