MTA-Agent: An Open Recipe for Multimodal Deep Search Agents

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Peng, Xiangyu, Qin, Can, Yan, An, Yang, Xinyi, Chen, Zeyuan, Xu, Ran, Wu, Chien-Sheng
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Peng, Xiangyu
Qin, Can
Yan, An
Yang, Xinyi
Chen, Zeyuan
Xu, Ran
Wu, Chien-Sheng
author_facet Peng, Xiangyu
Qin, Can
Yan, An
Yang, Xinyi
Chen, Zeyuan
Xu, Ran
Wu, Chien-Sheng
contents Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in visual understanding, yet they remain limited in complex, multi-step reasoning that requires deep searching and integrating visual evidence with external knowledge. In this work, we address this challenge by constructing high-quality, verified multi-hop vision-language training data for multimodal deep-search agents. We propose a Multi-hop Tool-Augmented Agent for Evidence-based QA Synthesis (MTA-Agent), which automatically selects tools and their parameters to retrieve and validate evidence from both visual and textual sources and generates structured multi-hop question-answer trajectories. Starting from diverse VQA seed datasets, our pipeline produces a large-scale training dataset, MTA-Vision-DeepSearch, containing 21K high-quality multi-hop examples. The data is filtered through a multi-stage verification process to ensure factual consistency and answer uniqueness. Using MTA-Vision-DeepSearch, a 32B open-source multimodal search agent achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching an average of 54.63\% across six challenging benchmarks, outperforming GPT-5 (51.86\%), Gemini-2.5-Pro (50.98\%), and Gemini-3-Pro (54.46\%) under the same tool settings. We further show that training on our data improves both reasoning depth and tool-use behavior, increasing the average number of steps from 2.27 to 4.28, and leading to more systematic and persistent search strategies. Additionally, we demonstrate that training can be performed without real-time tool calls by replaying cached interactions, significantly reducing training cost. Importantly, we present MTA-Agent as a fully open recipe for multimodal deep search: we release the entire dataset, training trajectories, and implementation details to enable reproducibility and future research on open multimodal search agents.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_06376
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MTA-Agent: An Open Recipe for Multimodal Deep Search Agents
Peng, Xiangyu
Qin, Can
Yan, An
Yang, Xinyi
Chen, Zeyuan
Xu, Ran
Wu, Chien-Sheng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in visual understanding, yet they remain limited in complex, multi-step reasoning that requires deep searching and integrating visual evidence with external knowledge. In this work, we address this challenge by constructing high-quality, verified multi-hop vision-language training data for multimodal deep-search agents. We propose a Multi-hop Tool-Augmented Agent for Evidence-based QA Synthesis (MTA-Agent), which automatically selects tools and their parameters to retrieve and validate evidence from both visual and textual sources and generates structured multi-hop question-answer trajectories. Starting from diverse VQA seed datasets, our pipeline produces a large-scale training dataset, MTA-Vision-DeepSearch, containing 21K high-quality multi-hop examples. The data is filtered through a multi-stage verification process to ensure factual consistency and answer uniqueness. Using MTA-Vision-DeepSearch, a 32B open-source multimodal search agent achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching an average of 54.63\% across six challenging benchmarks, outperforming GPT-5 (51.86\%), Gemini-2.5-Pro (50.98\%), and Gemini-3-Pro (54.46\%) under the same tool settings. We further show that training on our data improves both reasoning depth and tool-use behavior, increasing the average number of steps from 2.27 to 4.28, and leading to more systematic and persistent search strategies. Additionally, we demonstrate that training can be performed without real-time tool calls by replaying cached interactions, significantly reducing training cost. Importantly, we present MTA-Agent as a fully open recipe for multimodal deep search: we release the entire dataset, training trajectories, and implementation details to enable reproducibility and future research on open multimodal search agents.
title MTA-Agent: An Open Recipe for Multimodal Deep Search Agents
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06376