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.
arXiv:2610.08102v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conversational MLLM agents are increasingly expected to assist in professional workflows, from AI research and engineering design to product management...
MIRAGE is a controlled study that examines how multimodal personal agents use historical evidence when conversation state changes. The study keeps evidence, questions, and scoring constant while varying only the conversation state, then checks if agents can determine answerability, recover the correct source, and answer from it. Results across seven multimodal backbones show distinct failure regimes before and after compaction, heavy reliance on context continuity by open-weight models, and mixed effects of retrieval pressure on source attribution.
The ICDAR2026 Competition on Multimodal Reasoning over Documents in Multiple Domains introduced a new Visual Question Answering benchmark that tests reasoning over documents from eight distinct domains such as business reports, scientific papers, and engineering drawings. Twenty valid submissions from eight teams were evaluated, featuring approaches ranging from zero‑shot vision‑language models to multi‑agent ensembles and fine‑tuned multimodal systems. Results indicate that the most effective systems employ structured evidence extraction, retrieval, verification, and orchestration across multiple components rather than single‑pass prompting.
arXiv:2605. 29861v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced autonomous agents from deep search, which retrieves concise factual answers, to deep research, which synthesizes scattered evidence into long-form reports.
The paper introduces ReTurn, a benchmark of 7,000 multimodal tasks designed to evaluate how models selectively use conversational history. ReTurn includes pairs that test task-carrying history (Reconfirm/Reground) and evidence-carrying history (Retrieve/Rebind), each preserving the same target question, media, and answer. Experiments on 13 vision‑language and audio‑language models show a drop in open‑ended accuracy from 93.7% to 72.3% when history is involved, revealing that high question recall does not guarantee effective task application and that competing media can misdirect responses.
arXiv:2607. 22643v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (mRAG) aims to answer image-text queries with external knowledge, but most existing systems still retrieve directly from raw multimodal input over a flat evidence space.
Sci‑MMR is a new benchmark for multi‑step evidence‑grounded scientific reasoning in multimodal agents, featuring 235 multi‑hop tasks across four disciplines and an average of nine figure panels per task. It evaluates not just final answer accuracy but also the recovery of structured evidence from scientific claims, citations, visual data, and supporting regions. Experiments on eight state‑of‑the‑art models show a gap of over 20 points between answer accuracy and complete evidence recovery, highlighting significant challenges in evidence acquisition and integration.
Mr.LHDR is a new benchmark designed to evaluate deep research agents on long‑horizon, multimodal tasks. It presents questions built from hidden Node‑Relation graphs that require an average of 12.1 intermediate conclusions and a mean dependency depth of 10.4 before arriving at a single verifiable answer. The benchmark tests both final answers and the correctness of intermediate conclusions, using metrics such as Overall Accuracy, Strict Accuracy, Checklist Score, and Dependency‑Aware Checklist Score.
arXiv:2606. 05749v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Iterative retrieval-reasoning agents have recently shown promise for multimodal long-document question answering.
arXiv:2606. 21005v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scientific discovery workflows often depend on structured curation from the literature.
arXiv:2607. 24748v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visually-rich documents such as reports, slides, and manuals often distribute the evidence needed to answer a question across multiple pages, mixing text with layout cues, tables, charts, and figures.