Overview

Multimodal search agents use tools such as web, image, video, and document search to gather evidence and answer questions that require multiple retrieval steps. Common approaches combine visual-language models with retrieval and browsing workflows, then improve tool use through supervised trajectory training, reinforcement learning, process rewards, and memory or evidence graphs. Benchmarks such as MM-BrowseComp, InfoSeek, and MMSearch test retrieval, planning, visual grounding, and evidence integration, with newer evaluations also measuring effort and trajectory quality. Despite progress, agents still struggle to find relevant evidence efficiently, verify it across modalities, and avoid errors from conflicting or weakly grounded sources.

Latest papers

CardsList

47 papers9 papers in the last four weeks, against 1 the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. POINTS-Seeker: An Open Recipe for Multimodal Search Agents with Visual Memory Management

    Apr 15, 2026Yikun Liu, Yuan Liu, Haicheng Wang +6Multimodal Search AgentsMultimodal Agents

  2. MERRIN: A Benchmark for Multimodal Evidence Retrieval and Reasoning in Noisy Web Environments

    Apr 15, 2026Han Wang, David Wan, Hyunji Lee +6AI Agent BenchmarksMultimodal Search Agents

  3. Towards Long-horizon Agentic Multimodal Search

    Apr 14, 2026Yifan Du, Zikang Liu, Jinbiao Peng +5Multimodal Search AgentsLong-Horizon LLM Agents

  4. Deep-Reporter: Deep Research for Grounded Multimodal Long-Form Generation

    Apr 12, 2026Fangda Ye, Zhifei Xie, Yuxin Hu +5Multimodal GenerationMultimodal Grounding

  5. MTA-Agent: An Open Recipe for Multimodal Deep Search Agents

    Apr 7, 2026Xiangyu Peng, Can Qin, An Yan +4Multimodal Search AgentsMultimodal QA

  6. HippoCamp: Benchmarking Contextual Agents on Personal Computers

    Apr 1, 2026Zhe Yang, Shulin Tian, Kairui Hu +9AI Agent BenchmarksMultimodal Search Agents

  7. VisBrowse-Bench: Benchmarking Visual-Native Search for Multimodal Browsing Agents

    Mar 17, 2026Zhengbo Zhang, Jinbo Su, Zhaowen Zhou +14Multimodal Search AgentsAI Agent Benchmarks

  8. LLandMark: A Multi-Agent Framework for Landmark-Aware Multimodal Interactive Video Retrieval

    Mar 3, 2026Minh-Chi Phung, Thien-Bao Le, Cam-Tu Tran-Thi +2Multimodal IRMultimodal Search Agents

  9. VSearcher: Long-Horizon Multimodal Search Agent via Reinforcement Learning

    Mar 3, 2026Ruiyang Zhang, Qianguo Sun, Chao Song +2Multimodal Search AgentsMultimodal Tool Use

  10. PhotoBench: Beyond Visual Matching Towards Personalized Intent-Driven Photo Retrieval

    Mar 2, 2026Tianyi Xu, Rong Shan, Junjie Wu +11Multimodal IRImage Retrieval

  11. ProtRLSearch: A Multi-Round Multimodal Protein Search Agent with Large Language Models Trained via Reinforcement Learning

    Mar 2, 2026Congying Liu, Taihao Li, Ming Huang +5Multimodal Search AgentsBiomedical QA

  12. Securing the Floor and Raising the Ceiling: A Merging-based Paradigm for Multi-modal Search Agents

    Mar 2, 2026Zhixiang Wang, Jingxuan Xu, Dajun Chen +3Multimodal Search AgentsModel Merging

  13. MM-DeepResearch: A Simple and Effective Multimodal Agentic Search Baseline

    Mar 1, 2026Huanjin Yao, Qixiang Yin, Min Yang +5Multimodal Search AgentsMultimodal QA

  14. MC-Search: Evaluating and Enhancing Multimodal Agentic Search with Structured Long Reasoning Chains

    Mar 1, 2026Xuying Ning, Dongqi Fu, Tianxin Wei +7Multimodal RAGMultimodal Search Agents

  15. Video-Browser: Towards Open-web Agentic Video Browsing

    Dec 28, 2025Zhengyang Liang, Yan Shu, Xiangrui Liu +5Multimodal Search AgentsVideo QA

  16. MM-BrowseComp: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Browsing Agents

    Aug 14, 2025Shilong Li, Xingyuan Bu, Wenjie Wang +22Multimodal IRMultimodal Reasoning