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.
By Jiaqiang Li, Yajie Yang, Zhiheng Xi, Jiadong Chen, Enyu Zhou, Senjie Jin, Yang Nan, Jiazheng Zhang, Han Wang, Yanxin Li, Dingwei Zhu, Bicheng Deng, Yuhui Wang, Xiang Zheng, Qi Zhang, Lei Bai, Xingjun Ma, Tao Gui
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.
By Chenghao Zhang, Guanting Dong, Yufan Liu, Tong Zhao, Xiaoxi Li, Zhicheng Dou
arXiv:2608.29088v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multimodal question answering remains sensitive to noisy, incomplete, and weakly grounded evidence. Long unstructured contexts can introduce redundancy...
By Zafar Ali, Asad Khan, Nimbeshaho Thierry, Nabila Amir, Adam A. Q. Mohammed, Pavlos Kefalas
Deep Research Bench II is a new benchmark designed to evaluate Deep Research Agents (DRAs) by requiring them to produce research reports for 132 grounded tasks across 22 domains. Each report is assessed using 9,430 fine‑grained binary rubrics that cover information recall, analysis, and presentation, all derived from expert‑written investigative articles through a rigorous LLM‑plus‑human pipeline. Evaluation of current state‑of‑the‑art DRAs shows that even the best models satisfy fewer than 50% of these rubrics, highlighting a significant gap between automated agents and human experts.
By Ruizhe Li, Mingxuan Du, Benfeng Xu, Chiwei Zhu, Xiaorui Wang, Zhendong Mao
arXiv:2609.05518v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Despite the strong capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), their parametric knowledge remains incomplete and difficult to update, m...
By Jiacheng Cai, Zijin Hong, Zheng Yuan, Huachi Zhou, Qinggang Zhang, Xiao Huang
arXiv:2608. 14075v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific figures and tables encode essential experimental evidence, yet remain difficult for digital libraries and multimodal AI systems to retrieve and interpret.
By Jennifer D'Souza, Fahad Ahmed, Cecilia Andrea Bustamante Andrade, Lina Frolova, Poorani Gnanasambandan, Dilshad Hussain, Muhammad Uzair Khan, Nkembeng Kevin Nkengfoa, Paul Praveen J., Fabio Priante, Sjoerd Franciscus van der Werf, Thomas Frederik Jan van Roeden
arXiv:2608. 15056v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems often rely on long unstructured contexts or aggressively expanded evidence graphs, which can introduce noisy evidence, weaken multi-hop reasoning, and increase unsupported generation.
By Zafar Ali, Asad Khan, Aalia Malik, Pavlos Kefalas
arXiv:2607. 04625v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) streamlines long-document understanding by leveraging retrieval mechanisms to restrict input images to a highly curated subset.
By Junyu Xiong, Yonghui Wang, Rongjian Gu, Chenyu Liu, Bing Yin, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li
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.
By Seonok Kim
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) streamlines long-document understanding by leveraging retrieval mechanisms to restrict input images to a highly curated subset. However, existing multimodal RAG pipelines primarily face two critical challenges: first, standard semantic similarity retrievers frequently fetch topically overlapping yet answer-void distractor pages that mislead downstream generation; second, rigid single-pass pipelines heavily depend on initial retrieval success, where any omission of core evidence inevitably causes cascading errors.
arXiv:2608. 03292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long Document Visual Question Answering (LongDocVQA) requires Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to locate, integrate, and reason over heterogeneous document elements distributed across multiple pages.
By Le Xiang, Zhicheng Guan, Hong Chen, Xiaocong Lin, Zhenghua Lei, Teng Hu, Bolei He, Long Zeng
arXiv:2608.21796v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) aims to answer queries that necessitate reasoning over external knowledge sources beyond the visua...
By Long Shu, Shuochen Liu, Wei Chen, Junda Lin, Zhi Zheng, Huijun Hou, Tong Xu