Proof-of-Perception: Certified Tool-Using Multimodal Reasoning with Compositional Conformal Guarantees

Arya Fayyazi, Haleh Akrami; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 5144-5153

We present Proof-of-Perception (PoP), a tool-using framework that casts multimodal reasoning as an executable graph with explicit reliability guarantees. Each perception or logic node outputs a conformal set \Gamma^ (t) _\delta(x), yielding calibrated, stepwise uncertainty; a lightweight controller uses these certificates to allocate compute under a budget--expanding with extra tool calls only when needed and stopping early otherwise. This grounds answers in verifiable evidence, reduces error compounding and hallucinations, and enables principled accuracy-compute trade-offs. Across document, chart, and multi-image QA benchmarks, PoP improves performance and reliability over strong chain-of-thought, ReAct-style, and program-of-thought baselines while using computation more efficiently. Code is available at \href https://github.com/AryaFayyazi/PoP https://github.com/AryaFayyazi/PoP .