TAMA: Tool-Augmented Multimodal Agent for Procedural Activity Understanding

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission21520 Authors

Keywords: multimodal, agent, procedure, tool, reasoning, VLM

TL;DR: We propose a traning-free agentic framework for interleaved multimodal reasoning with tool-use.

Abstract:

Procedural activity assistants potentially support humans in a variety of settings, from our daily lives, e.g., cooking or assembling flat-pack furniture, to professional situations, e.g., manufacturing or biological experiments.
Despite its potential use cases, the system development tailored for such an assistant is still underexplored.

In this paper, we propose a novel framework, called TAMA, a Tool-Augmented Multimodal Agent, for procedural activity understanding.
TAMA enables interleaved multimodal reasoning by making use of multimedia-returning tools in a training-free setting.
Our experimental result on the multimodal procedural QA dataset, ProMQA-Assembly, shows that our approach can improve the performance of vision-language models, especially GPT-5 and MiMo-VL.
Furthermore, our ablation studies provide empirical support for the effectiveness of two features that characterize our framework, multimedia-returning tools and agentic flexible tool selection.

We believe our proposed framework and experimental results facilitate the thinking with images paradigm for video and multimodal tasks, let alone the development of procedural activity assistants.

Primary Area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities

Submission Number: 21520