Iterative retrieval-reasoning agents have recently shown promise for multimodal long-document question answering. However, most existing systems maintain a single growing context that mixes retrieval traces, observations, and intermediate reasoning.
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.
By Artemis Llabr\'es, Marc Serra Ortega, Tom\`as Ockier, Samuel Ortega Cuadra, Amritpal Singh, Christos Georgakilas, Andrey Barsky, Ernest Valveny, Dimosthenis Karatzas
arXiv:2606. 05749v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Iterative retrieval-reasoning agents have recently shown promise for multimodal long-document question answering.
By Kaifeng Chen, Hongtao Liu, Qiyao Peng, Jian Yang, Yongqiang Liu, Xiaochen Zhang, Qing Yang
arXiv:2609.08025v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reasoning agents increasingly rely on external tools such as web search to answer complex queries. Reinforcement learning (RL) finetuning algorithms su...
By Vishwas Sathish, Viresh Ranjan, Xinliang Zhu, Arnab Dhua, Douglas Gray
MAMath-Bench is a new benchmark that evaluates multimodal mathematical reasoning in multi‑agent systems (MASs). It contains 1,003 problems across 11 categories, multiple difficulty levels, and modalities such as text, images, and audio, with fine‑grained milestone annotations for correctness, reasoning‑process reliability, and robustness to adversarial perturbations. The study finds that while collaboration can improve intermediate reasoning coverage, it does not consistently boost final‑answer accuracy and can increase redundancy, and current systems remain vulnerable to subtle adversarial errors.
By Xinping Wang, Jie Ma, Rui Xing, Wensong Guo, Xiayi Zhang, Jianhao Deng, Zihao Zhou, Boqian Yang, Feijuan He
DocPilot is an agentic framework for long visual document understanding that orchestrates evidence seeking through page-level navigation and fine-grained localization, integrating visual inspection, code-based numerical reasoning, and cross-modal reasoning. It employs curriculum-based agentic training to enable small language models to learn complex document solving, progressing from single-ability learning to adaptive orchestration. Experiments on benchmarks such as MMLongBench-Doc, DocBench, FinRAGBench-V, and MADQA show that DocPilot achieves strong gains with frontier VLM backbones, and its 4B variant competes with much larger models, demonstrating effectiveness and generalization across diverse long-document reasoning tasks.
By Zhuowen Liang, Xiaotian Lin, Yuyu Luo, Haixun Wang, Nan Tang