Thinking With Tools, Not With Pixels: Tool Calls as Text Scaffolds for Visual Reasoning
Tool-augmented vision-language models increasingly "think with images": they call crop, zoom, or code tools and reason over the returned pixels. However, recent work using blind tests, gain decompositions, and attention analyses has shown that returned images contribute little, raising the question: if pixels do not carry the gain, what does? We hypothesize that the load-bearing signal is the structured text emitted before any returned pixel arrives: tool name, coordinates, target description, and intent. This textual scaffold encodes where to look and what to find. We introduce TextCall (call-but-no-return) to test this: it keeps the scaffold but replaces returned images with the text pl...
| Authors | Jiahao Shao, Yuanbo Yang, Yiyi Liao et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 10 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 August 2026 |
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