CounterCredit verifies visual calls to reduce spurious lookups and boost VLM performance
arXiv:2609.22910v1 introduces CounterCredit, a method that tests whether each image-returning call was both needed and actually used by computing a decision value (compare answering immediately vs. using the visual branch) and an evidence value (compare returned crop vs. random same-size patches). From the same cold start, prompt pool, and budget, CounterCredit outperforms an outcome-only GRPO baseline—reaching 89.5% on V*, 80.2% on HR-Bench-4K, and 76.4% on HR-Bench-8K while cutting spurious-call rates to ~31–36% and raising Qwen3-VL-8B from 75.4 to 80.8 on average.