Interleaved text-and-image generation represents a significant frontier for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), offering a more intuitive way to convey complex information. Current paradigms rely on either image generation or retrieval augmentation, yet they typically treat the two as mutually exclusive paths, failing to unify factuality with creativity. We argue that the next milestone in this field is Agentic Tool Planning, where the model serves as a central controller that autonomously determines when, where, and which tools to invoke to produce interleaved responses for visual-critical queries. To systematically evaluate this paradigm, we introduce ATP-Bench, a novel benchmark comprising 7,702 QA pairs (including 1,592 VQA pairs) across eight categories and 25 visual-critical intents, featuring human-verified queries and ground truths. Furthermore, to evaluate agentic planning independent of end-to-end execution and changing tool backends, we propose a Multi-Agent MLLM-as-a-Judge (MAM) system. MAM evaluates tool-call precision, identifies missed opportunities for tool use, and assesses overall response quality without requiring ground-truth references. Our extensive experiments on 10 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal that models struggle with coherent interleaved planning and exhibit significant variations in tool-use behavior, highlighting substantial room for improvement and providing actionable guidance for advancing interleaved generation. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Qwen-Applications/ATP-Bench.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Examples of eight task categories and corresponding model performance. Since our benchmark targets agentic tool-planning ability, evaluation outputs and ground truths contain tool-planning tags instead of rendered images (See Figure 2 ). For better interpretability, we present results obtained after end-to-end tool execution.
Dataset name
#Sample
Query type
Response IMG source
Annotated Query
Annotated GT
QA
VQA
Reference
Generation
OpenLEAF [ 1 ]
30
✓
✗
✗
✓
✗
✗
InterleavedBench [ 21 ]
815
✓
✓
✗
✓
✗
✗
OpenING [ 42 ]
5,400
✓
✓
✗
✓
✗
✗
RAG-IGBench [ 41 ]
6,057
✓
✗
✓
✗
✓
✓
MRAMG-Bench [ 40 ]
4,800
✓
✗
✓
✗
✓
✓
Table 1: Comparison of ATP-Bench with existing benchmarks. ATP-Bench is the first to integrate hybrid image sourcing (Reference & Generation) and dual query types (QA & VQA) with expert-level annotations for both queries and ground truths.
Category
Intent
#Query
#Doc per Q
#Img per Q
#TC per GT
Academic
Framework, Component, Comparison, Dataset, Result
196
1.00
3.34
1.96
Manual
Operation Guide, Function, Component
1,025
2.53
10.90
4.38
Recipe
Guideline, Ingredient
1,960
1.23
6.25
3.06
Fashion
Hairstyle, Makeup, Outfit, Photography
1,051
2.95
11.81
4.63
Renovation
Element, Style
440
2.92
11.98
4.79
Product
ProductIntro, Comparison, Authenticity
1,330
2.91
10.40
4.58
Table 2: Statistics of ATP-Bench . Note that "#TC per GT" stands for the number of tool calls per ground truth answer.
Figure 2: Overview of ATP-Bench dataset construction and evaluation pipelines.
MLLM
Academic
Manual
Recipe
Fashion
Renova.
Product
Travel
Encyclo.
Avg
Claude Sonnet 4.5
91.93
62.74
83.86
61.79
54.22
63.25
54.56
82.39
69.34
Claude Sonnet 4
88.12
63.37
82.85
62.21
54.33
63.87
54.77
83.69
69.15
Gemini 3 Pro
88.32
80.58
81.96
79.83
77.53
79.51
73.07
78.20
79.88
Grok-4.1
91.43
55.39
78.83
66.05
62.37
59.20
49.18
82.96
68.18
GPT-5
93.59
61.00
85.13
57.91
48.63
60.31
49.63
81.27
67.18
GPT-4o
86.27
56.38
79.86
48.76
43.19
53.34
43.94
73.59
60.67
Table 3: Final Score of models across eight categories (Renovation and Encyclopedia is abbreviated as Renova. and Encyclo. respectively).
MLLM
Academic
Manual
Recipe
Fashion
Renova.
Product
Travel
Encyclo.
Avg
Claude Sonnet 4.5
92.09
66.95
81.95
71.55
65.10
71.44
72.98
84.06
75.77
Claude Sonnet 4
87.31
66.60
80.49
71.80
62.58
71.46
70.77
79.85
73.86
Gemini 3 Pro
78.89
82.97
74.11
85.92
86.43
86.44
87.86
71.55
81.77
Grok-4.1
90.82
57.92
74.53
69.77
71.41
60.92
62.54
81.79
71.21
GPT-5
94.54
60.80
84.41
64.92
47.62
66.43
63.08
72.01
69.23
GPT-4o
85.83
55.24
79.13
54.07
38.34
63.56
55.96
60.89
61.63
Table 4: Success Rate of models across eight categories.
MLLM
Academic
Manual
Recipe
Fashion
Renova.
Product
Travel
Encyclo.
Avg
Claude Sonnet 4.5
0.10
1.53
0.29
1.29
1.78
1.31
2.93
0.30
1.19
Claude Sonnet 4
0.06
1.18
0.23
1.09
1.55
1.15
2.38
0.25
0.99
Gemini 3 Pro
0.15
0.44
0.25
0.46
0.52
0.52
1.31
0.24
0.49
Grok-4.1
0.05
1.55
0.44
0.96
1.22
1.27
2.75
0.22
1.06
GPT-5
0.14
1.32
0.31
1.30
1.67
1.29
2.60
0.26
1.11
GPT-4o
0.28
1.50
0.51
1.65
1.80
1.68
3.03
0.36
1.35
Table 5: Missed Image of models across eight categories; lower is better.
Figure 3: Tool call number distribution for representative models.
Figure 4: Tool Adoption Rates per query for representative models. The reference tool is omitted due to its high dominance; all models utilize it in over 90% of queries.
Figure 5: Tool Success Rates per tool call for representative models on each tool.
Table 11
Figure 6: Impact of tool boundary on Tool Adoption Rate. Claude 4.5 and Gemini 3 denote Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Gemini 3 Pro, respectively.
Table 8: Impact of the judge model and inter-judge rank correlation. Claude, Gemini, and GPT denote Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and GPT-5, respectively.
Model
# Inappr.
MI ↓
FS ↑
Claude Sonnet 4.5
1.02
0.26
3.60
Claude Sonnet 4
1.59
0.34
3.35
Gemini 3 Pro
0.82
0.06
3.89
Grok-4.1
1.17
0.10
3.53
GPT-5
0.78
0.39
3.63
GPT-4o
0.54
0.88
3.24
Table 9: Human evaluation on end-to-end execution. Note that fewer # Inappr. images do not imply a higher Success Rate, as malformed tool calls fail to generate any output.
Tool use in vision-language models (VLMs) studies how models call visual, computational, and retrieval tools to improve grounded perception and reasoning.
Recent image generators have demonstrated impressive photorealism and instruction-following capabilities in single-image generation and editing. However, constrained by their architectures, they cannot achieve interleaved generation (text-image sequence), which has crucial applications in visual narratives, guidance, and embodied manipulation. Even the latest open-source Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) exhibit limited performance in this regard. In this paper, we introduce InterleaveThinker, the first multi-agent pipeline designed to endow any existing image generator with interleaved generation capabilities. Specifically, we employ a planner agent to organize the image-text input sequence, instructing the image generator on the required execution at each step. Subsequently, we introduce a critic agent to evaluate the generator's outputs, identify samples that deviate from the planned instructions, and refine the instructions for regeneration. To implement this pipeline, we construct the Interleave-Planner-SFT-80k and Interleave-Critic-SFT-112k to perform a format cold-start. Then we develop Interleave-Critic-RL-13k to reinforce the step-wise instruction correction capability within a generation trajectory using GRPO. Since a single interleaved generation trajectory may involve over 25 generator calls, optimizing the entire trajectory is computationally impractical. Therefore, we propose accuracy reward and step-wise reward, allowing single-step RL to effectively guide the entire generation trajectory. The results show that InterleaveThinker improves performance across various image generators. On interleaved generation benchmarks, it achieves performance comparable to Nano Banana and GPT-5. Surprisingly, it also significantly enhances the base model on reasoning-based benchmarks; for example, on 4-step FLUX.2-klein, we observe substantial gains on WISE and RISE.
Recent unified models have made unprecedented progress in both understanding and generation. However, while most of them accept multi-modal inputs, they typically produce only single-modality outputs. This challenge of producing interleaved content is mainly due to training data scarcity and the difficulty of modeling long-range cross-modal context. To address this issue, we decompose interleaved generation into textual planning and visual consistency modeling, and introduce a framework consisting of a planner and a visualizer. The planner produces dense textual descriptions for visual content, while the visualizer synthesizes images accordingly. Under this guidance, we construct large-scale textual-proxy interleaved data (where visual content is represented in text) to train the planner, and curate reference-guided image data to train the visualizer. These designs give rise to Wan-Weaver, which exhibits emergent interleaved generation ability with long-range textual coherence and visual consistency. Meanwhile, the integration of diverse understanding and generation data into planner training enables Wan-Weaver to achieve robust task reasoning and generation proficiency. To assess the model's capability in interleaved generation, we further construct a benchmark that spans a wide range of use cases across multiple dimensions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, even without access to any real interleaved data, Wan-Weaver achieves superior performance over existing methods.
In real-world multimodal applications, systems usually need to comprehend arbitrarily combined and interleaved multimodal inputs from users, while also generating outputs in any interleaved multimedia form. This capability defines the goal of any-to-any interleaved multimodal learning under a unified paradigm of understanding and generation, posing new challenges and opportunities for advancing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). To foster and benchmark this capability, this paper introduces the UniM benchmark, the first Unified Any-to-Any Interleaved Multimodal dataset. UniM contains 31K high-quality instances across 30 domains and 7 representative modalities: text, image, audio, video, document, code, and 3D, each requiring multiple intertwined reasoning and generation capabilities. We further introduce the UniM Evaluation Suite, which assesses models along three dimensions: Semantic Correctness & Generation Quality, Response Structure Integrity, and Interleaved Coherence. In addition, we propose UniMA, an agentic baseline model equipped with traceable reasoning for structured interleaved generation. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the difficulty of UniM and highlight key challenges and directions for advancing unified any-to-any multimodal intelligence. The project page is https://any2any-mllm.github.io/unim.