cs.CVAug 3, 2026

DeepVoyager-VL: Incentivizing Vision-in-the-Loop Search for Long-Horizon Multimodal Agents

Authors: Huanyao ZhangJiepeng ZhouRunhao ZhaoYanzhe ShanJiaoyang ChenBowen ZhouBo LiFang Wang+7 more

Organizations: 1PKU · 2HKUST(GZ) · 3NUDT · 4OUC · 5HITSZ · 6Huawei Cloud BU

Abstract

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced visual understanding and reasoning, yet their static parametric knowledge limits their ability to address knowledge-intensive and dynamically evolving open-world problems. To move beyond this limitation, multimodal deep search has emerged as a key direction for open-world information access, evolving from single-turn factual retrieval toward long-horizon, multi-turn search guided by visual evidence. However, existing methods typically confine vision to the input or answer stage, overlooking its role in intermediate reasoning, and lack designs tailored to long-horizon interaction. Consequently, visual evidence rarely drives continued retrieval, constraining both interaction depth and reasoning span. To address these limitations, we propose DeepVoyager-VL, a long-horizon multimodal deep-search framework for vision-in-the-loop search. Specifically, we construct a multimodal event graph to drive data synthesis, yielding problems with intermediate visual dependencies and long reasoning chains. We then design an agent framework for active visual acquisition and on-demand image loading. Finally, we fine-tune models on the synthesized data without reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments across ten multimodal search benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Explore similar work

Jun 13, 2026cs.AI

Visual-Seeker: Towards Visual-Native Multimodal Agentic Search via Active Visual Reasoning

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in many visual tasks, but they often struggle with factual grounding when confronted with complex, open-world scenarios. While recent multimodal deep search agents attempt to address this issue by utilizing external tools, the visual-native search paradigm remains underexplored. Existing methods primarily rely on simple images with explicit semantics and text-only evidence trajectories, limiting the agent's ability to perform multi-hop, cross-modal reasoning and search. To address these limitations, we propose Visual-Seeker, a visual-native multimodal deep search agent via active visual reasoning. Rather than treating vision as a static input, our agent actively attends to fine-grained visual details, dynamically harvests visual evidence throughout the search process. To unlock its visual-native potential, we design an active visual reasoning data pipeline and synthesize 5K high-quality multimodal trajectories for model training. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance across five challenging multimodal search benchmarks, even surpassing several proprietary models, validating robust visual-native reasoning and search in real-world web environments. The code and data can be accessed at: https://github.com/ZhengboZhang/Visual-Seeker.
Zhengbo Zhang, Changtao Miao, Jinbo Su +10
May 6, 2026cs.CV

OpenSearch-VL: An Open Recipe for Frontier Multimodal Search Agents

Deep search has become a crucial capability for frontier multimodal agents, enabling models to solve complex questions through active search, evidence verification, and multi-step reasoning. Despite rapid progress, top-tier multimodal search agents remain difficult to reproduce, largely due to the absence of open high-quality training data, transparent trajectory synthesis pipelines, or detailed training recipes. To this end, we introduce OpenSearch-VL, a fully open-source recipe for training frontier multimodal deep search agents with agentic reinforcement learning. First, we curated a dedicated pipeline to construct high-quality training data through Wikipedia path sampling, fuzzy entity rewriting, and source-anchor visual grounding, which jointly reduce shortcuts and one-step retrieval collapse. Based on this pipeline, we curate two training datasets, SearchVL-SFT-36k for SFT and SearchVL-RL-8k for RL. Besides, we design a diverse tool environment that unifies text search, image search, OCR, cropping, sharpening, super-resolution, and perspective correction, enabling agents to combine active perception with external knowledge acquisition. Finally, we propose a multi-turn fatal-aware GRPO training algorithm that handles cascading tool failures by masking post-failure tokens while preserving useful pre-failure reasoning through one-sided advantage clamping. Built on this recipe, OpenSearch-VL delivers substantial performance gains, with over 10-point average improvements across seven benchmarks, and achieves results comparable to proprietary commercial models on several tasks. We will release all data, code, and models to support open research on multimodal deep search agents.
Shuang Chen, Kaituo Feng, Hangting Chen +7
Jul 3, 2026cs.CV

VideoSearcher: Empowering Video Deep Research with Multi-Tool Agentic Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning

Video understanding is moving beyond closed-context perception toward open-world evidence exploration, a paradigm formalized as Video Deep Research (VDR). However, existing multimodal search agents primarily target static images, and the current VDR benchmark relies on text-centric retrieval that discards crucial visual information. To address these limitations, we propose VideoSearcher, a closed-loop agentic framework that empowers Vision-Language Models with multi-tool reasoning for VDR. VideoSearcher unifies temporal localization, spatial focusing, and multimodal search within a single reasoning trajectory, enabling agents to progressively ground visual clues, retrieve relevant evidence, and synthesize answers. To optimize knowledge-intensive reasoning trajectories, we propose Bi-branch Sequence Policy Optimization (BiSPO), a reinforcement learning algorithm that decouples tool-invocation optimization from answer-accuracy optimization. This design provides stable learning signals for both evidence-grounded reasoning and purposeful tool use. Furthermore, we construct VideoSearch-QA, the first benchmark designed to evaluate open-world video information grounding and multimodal search-based reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VideoSearcher significantly outperforms prior open-source agentic baselines across various search-oriented and multimodal understanding benchmarks.
Zhenkun Gao, Yicheng Bao, Jinlong Peng +13