Be My Eyes: Extending Large Language Models to New Modalities Through Multi-Agent Collaboration

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Huang, James Y., Zhang, Sheng, Liu, Qianchu, Qin, Guanghui, Zhu, Tinghui, Naumann, Tristan, Chen, Muhao, Poon, Hoifung
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Huang, James Y.
Zhang, Sheng
Liu, Qianchu
Qin, Guanghui
Zhu, Tinghui
Naumann, Tristan
Chen, Muhao
Poon, Hoifung
author_facet Huang, James Y.
Zhang, Sheng
Liu, Qianchu
Qin, Guanghui
Zhu, Tinghui
Naumann, Tristan
Chen, Muhao
Poon, Hoifung
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in challenging, knowledge-intensive reasoning tasks. However, extending LLMs to perceive and reason over a new modality (e.g., vision), often requires costly development of large-scale vision language models (VLMs) with LLMs as backbones. Smaller VLMs are more efficient and adaptable but often lack the broad knowledge and reasoning capabilities of frontier LLMs. In this work, we propose BeMyEyes, a modular, multi-agent framework for extending LLMs to multimodal reasoning by orchestrating collaboration between efficient, adaptable VLMs as perceivers and powerful LLMs as reasoners through conversations. We then introduce a data synthesis and supervised fine-tuning pipeline to train the perceiver agent to effectively collaborate with the reasoner agent. By combining the complementary strengths of perception and reasoning agents, BeMyEyes avoids the need for training large-scale multimodal models, preserves the generalization and reasoning capabilities of LLMs, and allows flexible extension to new domains and modalities. Experiments show that our framework unlocks the multimodal reasoning capabilities for LLMs, enabling a lightweight and fully open-source solution, i.e. equipping text-only DeepSeek-R1 with Qwen2.5-VL-7B perceiver, to outperform large-scale proprietary VLMs such as GPT-4o on a wide range of knowledge-intensive multimodal tasks. These results demonstrate the effectiveness, modularity, and scalability of our multi-agent approach for building future multimodal reasoning systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_19417
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Be My Eyes: Extending Large Language Models to New Modalities Through Multi-Agent Collaboration
Huang, James Y.
Zhang, Sheng
Liu, Qianchu
Qin, Guanghui
Zhu, Tinghui
Naumann, Tristan
Chen, Muhao
Poon, Hoifung
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in challenging, knowledge-intensive reasoning tasks. However, extending LLMs to perceive and reason over a new modality (e.g., vision), often requires costly development of large-scale vision language models (VLMs) with LLMs as backbones. Smaller VLMs are more efficient and adaptable but often lack the broad knowledge and reasoning capabilities of frontier LLMs. In this work, we propose BeMyEyes, a modular, multi-agent framework for extending LLMs to multimodal reasoning by orchestrating collaboration between efficient, adaptable VLMs as perceivers and powerful LLMs as reasoners through conversations. We then introduce a data synthesis and supervised fine-tuning pipeline to train the perceiver agent to effectively collaborate with the reasoner agent. By combining the complementary strengths of perception and reasoning agents, BeMyEyes avoids the need for training large-scale multimodal models, preserves the generalization and reasoning capabilities of LLMs, and allows flexible extension to new domains and modalities. Experiments show that our framework unlocks the multimodal reasoning capabilities for LLMs, enabling a lightweight and fully open-source solution, i.e. equipping text-only DeepSeek-R1 with Qwen2.5-VL-7B perceiver, to outperform large-scale proprietary VLMs such as GPT-4o on a wide range of knowledge-intensive multimodal tasks. These results demonstrate the effectiveness, modularity, and scalability of our multi-agent approach for building future multimodal reasoning systems.
title Be My Eyes: Extending Large Language Models to New Modalities Through Multi-Agent Collaboration
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19417