VSearcher: Long-Horizon Multimodal Search Agent via Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Ruiyang, Sun, Qianguo, Song, Chao, Qi, Yiyan, Zheng, Zhedong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Zhang, Ruiyang
Sun, Qianguo
Song, Chao
Qi, Yiyan
Zheng, Zhedong
author_facet Zhang, Ruiyang
Sun, Qianguo
Song, Chao
Qi, Yiyan
Zheng, Zhedong
contents Large models are increasingly becoming autonomous agents that interact with real-world environments and use external tools to augment their static capabilities. However, most recent progress has focused on text-only large language models, which are limited to a single modality and therefore have narrower application scenarios. On the other hand, multimodal large models, while offering stronger perceptual capabilities, remain limited to static knowledge and lack the ability to access and leverage up-to-date web information. In this paper, we propose VSearcher, turning static multimodal model into multimodal search agent capable of long-horizon, multi-turn tool use in real-world web environments, including text search, image search, and web browsing, via reinforcement learning. Specifically, we introduce Iterative Injection Data Synthesis pipeline to generate large-scale, complex multimodal QA questions, which are further filtered with comprehensive metrics to ensure high quality and sufficient difficulty. We then adopt an SFT-then-RL training pipeline to turn base multimodal models to agent capable of multi-turn tool calling in real-world web environments. Besides, we propose a multimodal search benchmark MM-SearchExam dedicated to evaluating search capabilities of multimodal search agents, which proves highly challenging for recent proprietary models. Extensive evaluations across multiple multimodal search benchmarks reveal effectiveness of our method. VSearcher achieves superior performance compared to recent multimodal search agents and even surpasses several proprietary models on multimodal web search tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_02795
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VSearcher: Long-Horizon Multimodal Search Agent via Reinforcement Learning
Zhang, Ruiyang
Sun, Qianguo
Song, Chao
Qi, Yiyan
Zheng, Zhedong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Large models are increasingly becoming autonomous agents that interact with real-world environments and use external tools to augment their static capabilities. However, most recent progress has focused on text-only large language models, which are limited to a single modality and therefore have narrower application scenarios. On the other hand, multimodal large models, while offering stronger perceptual capabilities, remain limited to static knowledge and lack the ability to access and leverage up-to-date web information. In this paper, we propose VSearcher, turning static multimodal model into multimodal search agent capable of long-horizon, multi-turn tool use in real-world web environments, including text search, image search, and web browsing, via reinforcement learning. Specifically, we introduce Iterative Injection Data Synthesis pipeline to generate large-scale, complex multimodal QA questions, which are further filtered with comprehensive metrics to ensure high quality and sufficient difficulty. We then adopt an SFT-then-RL training pipeline to turn base multimodal models to agent capable of multi-turn tool calling in real-world web environments. Besides, we propose a multimodal search benchmark MM-SearchExam dedicated to evaluating search capabilities of multimodal search agents, which proves highly challenging for recent proprietary models. Extensive evaluations across multiple multimodal search benchmarks reveal effectiveness of our method. VSearcher achieves superior performance compared to recent multimodal search agents and even surpasses several proprietary models on multimodal web search tasks.
title VSearcher: Long-Horizon Multimodal Search Agent via Reinforcement Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02795