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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Huang, Peizhou, Zhong, Zixuan, Wan, Zhongwei, Zhou, Donghao, Alam, Samiul, Wang, Xin, Li, Zexin, Dou, Zhihao, Zhu, Li, Xiong, Jing, Tao, Chaofan, Xu, Yan, Dimitriadis, Dimitrios, Zhang, Tuo, Zhang, Mi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.12346
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Table of Contents:
  • Deep Research Agents (DRAs) generate citation-rich reports via multi-step search and synthesis, yet existing benchmarks mainly target text-only settings or short-form multimodal QA, missing end-to-end multimodal evidence use. We introduce MMDeepResearch-Bench (MMDR-Bench), a benchmark of 140 expert-crafted tasks across 21 domains, where each task provides an image-text bundle to evaluate multimodal understanding and citation-grounded report generation. Compared to prior setups, MMDR-Bench emphasizes report-style synthesis with explicit evidence use, where models must connect visual artifacts to sourced claims and maintain consistency across narrative, citations, and visual references. We further propose a unified, interpretable evaluation pipeline: Formula-LLM Adaptive Evaluation (FLAE) for report quality, Trustworthy Retrieval-Aligned Citation Evaluation (TRACE) for citation-grounded evidence alignment, and Multimodal Support-Aligned Integrity Check (MOSAIC) for text-visual integrity, each producing fine-grained signals that support error diagnosis beyond a single overall score. Experiments across 25 state-of-the-art models reveal systematic trade-offs between generation quality, citation discipline, and multimodal grounding, highlighting that strong prose alone does not guarantee faithful evidence use and that multimodal integrity remains a key bottleneck for deep research agents.