The paper surveys how large multimodal models (LMMs) enhance agentic frameworks that combine perception, memory, reasoning, planning, and action. It examines the integration of multiple modalities—text, images, audio, and video—through delegated, late‑fusion, and early‑fusion architectures, and maps these designs to agent capabilities. The survey also reviews multimodal agentic systems in robotics, web navigation, multimedia content creation, and video understanding, evaluating performance, efficiency, and scalability trade‑offs.
By Neel Mokaria, Rishie Raj, Dheeraj Baiju, Xiaoqian Shen, Shraman Pramanick, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Arda Senocak, Mike Zheng Shou, Philip Torr, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Yapeng Tian, Ruohan Gao, Salman Khan, Sayan Nag, Sanjoy Chowdhury, Dinesh Manocha
arXiv:2606. 29648v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Different retrievers, including lexical, semantic, and multimodal approaches, provide highly complementary strengths for multimodal document understanding, yet most systems combine them through fixed pipelines that cannot adapt to the demands of individual reasoning steps.
By Bohan Yao, Shruthan Radhakrishna, Vikas Yadav
The paper introduces KNOWS, a benchmark for evaluating web agents that act as assistants by retrieving, synthesizing, and presenting information across complex, multi-step browser tasks. It outlines a task design rubric, evaluation protocol combining deterministic checks with LLM judgments, and reports that current agents achieve only modest success, with the best performing agent succeeding on less than 3% of tasks. The study highlights significant gaps in agents’ tool use, visual understanding, and long‑horizon reasoning.
By Alexander Gill, Md Farhan Ishmam, Xuyen Nguyen, Neha Bhat, Parker Henry DeYoung, Fateme Hashemi Chaleshtori, Nathan Stringham, Kenneth Marino, Ana Marasovi\'c
arXiv:2603. 12056v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimodal agents can now tackle complex reasoning tasks with diverse tools, yet they still suffer from inefficient tool use and inflexible orchestration in open-ended settings.
By Guanyu Jiang, Zhaochen Su, Xiaoye Qu, Yi R. Fung
Building capable visual web agents requires long-horizon reasoning, precise grounding, and robust interaction with dynamic real-world websites. Despite rapid progress, the strongest systems remain largely proprietary, while open agents still depend heavily on supervised post-training over large collections of curated web trajectories.
arXiv:2511. 12997v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimodal LLM-powered agents have recently demonstrated impressive capabilities in web navigation, enabling agents to complete complex browsing tasks across diverse domains.
By Genglin Liu, Shijie Geng, Sha Li, Hejie Cui, Sarah Zhang, Xin Liu, Tianyi Liu
arXiv:2607. 12042v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual generation is increasingly ubiquitous in diverse domains, from text-to-image/video synthesis to multimodal interactive creation.
By Jinxiu Liu, Jianru Li, Tanqing Kuang, Xuanming Liu, Kangfu Mei, Yandong Wen, Weiyang Liu
The paper introduces Cognitive Chain-of-Thought (CoCoT), a structured reasoning framework for vision‑language models that divides multimodal social reasoning into three cognitively inspired stages: Perception, Situation, and Norm. CoCoT improves performance across diverse tasks—multimodal intent disambiguation, theory of mind, social commonsense reasoning, and safety instruction following—by 5.9% to 4.6% on average. Fine‑tuning on CoCoT‑structured traces further boosts accuracy by 5–6% without explicit prompting, indicating that models internalize the structured reasoning pattern and that the approach enhances interpretability and social alignment in multimodal systems.
By Eunkyu Park, Wesley Hanwen Deng, Gunhee Kim, Motahhare Eslami, Maarten Sap
arXiv:2606. 28357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in multimodal recommenders excel at feature fusion but remain opaque and inefficient decision-makers, lacking explicit reasoning and self-awareness of uncertainty.
By Yihua Zhang, Mingfu Liang, Jiyan Yang, Rong Jin, Wen-Yen Chen, Yiping Han, Huayu Li, Buyun Zhang, Liang Luo, Frank Shyu, Luke Simon, Sijia Liu, Tianlong Chen, Xi Liu
arXiv:2510. 19838v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous web agents powered by large language models (LLMs) show strong potential for performing goal-oriented tasks such as information retrieval, report generation, and online transactions.
By Shiqi He, Yue Cui, Xinyu Ma, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Mosharaf Chowdhury
The paper introduces UniSandbox, a decoupled evaluation framework with controlled synthetic datasets, to study whether understanding informs generation in Unified Multimodal Models. Results show a notable understanding‑generation gap, especially in reasoning generation and knowledge transfer. Explicit Chain‑of‑Thought (CoT) in the understanding module bridges this gap, and self‑training can internalize CoT for implicit reasoning during generation; query‑based architectures also exhibit latent CoT‑like properties that aid knowledge transfer.
By Yuwei Niu, Weiyang Jin, Jiaqi Liao, Chaoran Feng, Peng Jin, Bin Lin, Zongjian Li, Bin Zhu, Weihao Yu, Li Yuan
arXiv:2606. 07512v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current Vision-Language Models struggle with hours-long videos because processing full-length visual sequences induces prohibitive token explosion and attention dilution.
By Cong Chen, Guo Gan, Kaixiang Ji, ChaoYang Zhang, Zhen Yang, Guangming Yao, Hao Chen, Jingdong Chen, Yi Yuan, Chunhua Shen