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Main Authors: Sivakumaran, Nithin, Chen, Justin Chih-Yao, Wan, David, Zhang, Yue, Yoon, Jaehong, Stengel-Eskin, Elias, Bansal, Mohit
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07132
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author Sivakumaran, Nithin
Chen, Justin Chih-Yao
Wan, David
Zhang, Yue
Yoon, Jaehong
Stengel-Eskin, Elias
Bansal, Mohit
author_facet Sivakumaran, Nithin
Chen, Justin Chih-Yao
Wan, David
Zhang, Yue
Yoon, Jaehong
Stengel-Eskin, Elias
Bansal, Mohit
contents Specialized visual tools can augment large language models or vision language models with expert knowledge (e.g., grounding, spatial reasoning, medical knowledge, etc.), but knowing which tools to call (and when to call them) can be challenging. We introduce DART, a multi-agent framework that uses disagreements between multiple debating visual agents to identify useful visual tools (e.g., object detection, OCR, spatial reasoning, etc.) that can resolve inter-agent disagreement. These tools allow for fruitful multi-agent discussion by introducing new information, and by providing tool-aligned agreement scores that highlight agents in agreement with expert tools, thereby facilitating discussion. We utilize an aggregator agent to select the best answer by providing the agent outputs and tool information. We test DART on four diverse benchmarks and show that our approach improves over multi-agent debate as well as over single agent tool-calling frameworks, beating the next-strongest baseline (multi-agent debate with a judge model) by 3.4% and 2.4% on A-OKVQA and MMMU respectively. We also find that DART adapts well to new tools in applied domains, with a 1.3% improvement on the M3D medical dataset over other strong tool-calling, single agent, and multi-agent baselines. Additionally, we measure text overlap across rounds to highlight the rich discussion in DART compared to existing multi-agent methods. Finally, we study the tool call distribution, finding that diverse tools are reliably used to help resolve disagreement.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_07132
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DART: Leveraging Multi-Agent Disagreement for Tool Recruitment in Multimodal Reasoning
Sivakumaran, Nithin
Chen, Justin Chih-Yao
Wan, David
Zhang, Yue
Yoon, Jaehong
Stengel-Eskin, Elias
Bansal, Mohit
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Specialized visual tools can augment large language models or vision language models with expert knowledge (e.g., grounding, spatial reasoning, medical knowledge, etc.), but knowing which tools to call (and when to call them) can be challenging. We introduce DART, a multi-agent framework that uses disagreements between multiple debating visual agents to identify useful visual tools (e.g., object detection, OCR, spatial reasoning, etc.) that can resolve inter-agent disagreement. These tools allow for fruitful multi-agent discussion by introducing new information, and by providing tool-aligned agreement scores that highlight agents in agreement with expert tools, thereby facilitating discussion. We utilize an aggregator agent to select the best answer by providing the agent outputs and tool information. We test DART on four diverse benchmarks and show that our approach improves over multi-agent debate as well as over single agent tool-calling frameworks, beating the next-strongest baseline (multi-agent debate with a judge model) by 3.4% and 2.4% on A-OKVQA and MMMU respectively. We also find that DART adapts well to new tools in applied domains, with a 1.3% improvement on the M3D medical dataset over other strong tool-calling, single agent, and multi-agent baselines. Additionally, we measure text overlap across rounds to highlight the rich discussion in DART compared to existing multi-agent methods. Finally, we study the tool call distribution, finding that diverse tools are reliably used to help resolve disagreement.
title DART: Leveraging Multi-Agent Disagreement for Tool Recruitment in Multimodal Reasoning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07132