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

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.