# MDocAgent: A Multi-Modal Multi-Agent Framework for Document Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.13964 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13964/

## Key facts

- Cited by 67 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal and embodied agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 46 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Multimodal and embodied agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/multimodal-and-embodied-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08155/) (2023)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17760/) (2023)
- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [ChatEval: Towards Better LLM-based Evaluators through Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07201/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Overview of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06435/) (2023)
- [ColBERTv2: Effective and Efficient Retrieval via Lightweight Late Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01488/) (2021)
- [Analyzing and Mitigating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00754/) (2023)
- [mPLUG-DocOwl 1.5: Unified Structure Learning for OCR-free Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12895/) (2024)
- [Aligning Modalities in Vision Large Language Models via Preference Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11411/) (2024)
- [ColPali: Efficient Document Retrieval with Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01449/) (2024)
- [SlideVQA: A Dataset for Document Visual Question Answering on Multiple Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04883/) (2023)
- [MDAgents: An Adaptive Collaboration of LLMs for Medical Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15155/) (2024)
- [SMART-LLM: Smart Multi-Agent Robot Task Planning using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10062/) (2023)
- [MotionGPT: Finetuned LLMs Are General-Purpose Motion Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10900/) (2023)
- [M3DocRAG: Multi-modal Retrieval is What You Need for Multi-page Multi-document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04952/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical multimodal transformers for Multi-Page DocVQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05935/) (2022)
- [LayoutLLM: Layout Instruction Tuning with Large Language Models for Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05225/) (2024)
- [MMed-RAG: Versatile Multimodal RAG System for Medical Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13085/) (2024)
- [Calibrated Self-Rewarding Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14622/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 67)

- [From AI for Science to Agentic Science: A Survey on Autonomous Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14111/) (2025)
- [Agent0: Unleashing Self-Evolving Agents from Zero Data via Tool-Integrated Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16043/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Agentic Reasoning for Large Language Models: Towards Recursively Self-Improving and Collective Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12538/) (2026)
- [Towards Agentic RAG with Deep Reasoning: A Survey of RAG-Reasoning Systems in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09477/) (2025)
- [MMedAgent-RL: Optimizing Multi-Agent Collaboration for Multimodal Medical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00555/) (2025)
- [HM-RAG: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12330/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Data Agents: Emerging Paradigm or Overstated Hype?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23587/) (2025)
- [SimpleDoc: Multi-Modal Document Understanding with Dual-Cue Page Retrieval and Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14035/) (2025)
- [MedSAM3: Delving into Segment Anything with Medical Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19046/) (2025)
- [Weak-for-Strong: Training Weak Meta-Agent to Harness Strong Executors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04785/) (2025)
- [Resolving Evidence Sparsity: Agentic Context Engineering for Long-Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22850/) (2025)
- [MoLoRAG: Bootstrapping Document Understanding via Multi-modal Logic-aware Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07666/) (2025)
- [DocLens : A Tool-Augmented Multi-Agent Framework for Long Visual Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11552/) (2025)
- [DocDancer: Towards Agentic Document-Grounded Information Seeking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05163/) (2026)
- [Dual Latent Memory for Visual Multi-agent System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00471/) (2026)
- [Scaling Beyond Context: A Survey of Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15253/) (2025)
- [A Multimodal Multi-Agent Framework for Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09787/) (2025)
- [Structured Attention Matters to Multimodal LLMs in Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21600/) (2025)
- [A Survey on MLLM-based Visually Rich Document Understanding: Methods, Challenges, and Emerging Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09861/) (2025)
- [Unlocking Multimodal Document Intelligence: From Current Triumphs to Future Frontiers of Visual Document Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19961/) (2026)
- [Alignment Tipping Process: How Self-Evolution Pushes LLM Agents Off the Rails](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04860/) (2025)
- [LAD-RAG: Layout-aware Dynamic RAG for Visually-Rich Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07233/) (2025)
- [From EduVisBench to EduVisAgent: A Benchmark and Multi-Agent Framework for Reasoning-Driven Pedagogical Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16832/) (2025)
- [Are We on the Right Way for Assessing Document Retrieval-Augmented Generation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03644/) (2025)
- [AgenticOCR: Parsing Only What You Need for Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.24134/) (2026)
- [MM-Doc-R1: Training Agents for Long Document Visual Question Answering through Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13579/) (2026)
- [PaperMind: Benchmarking Agentic Reasoning and Critique over Scientific Papers in Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21304/) (2026)
- [DocPrune:Efficient Document Question Answering via Background, Question, and Comprehension-aware Token Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22281/) (2026)
- [AGORA: An Archive-Grounded Benchmark for Agentic Workplace Document Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24526/) (2026)
- [SlideAgent: Hierarchical Agentic Framework for Multi-Page Visual Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26615/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Document Question Answering (DocQA) is a very common task. Existing methods using Large Language Models (LLMs) or Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) often prioritize information from a single modal, failing to effectively integrate textual and visual cues. These approaches struggle with complex multi-modal reasoning, limiting their performance on real-world documents. We present MDocAgent (A Multi-Modal Multi-Agent Framework for Document Understanding), a novel RAG and multi-agent framework that leverages both text and image. Our system employs five specialized agents: a general agent, a critical agent, a text agent, an image agent and a summarizing agent. These agents engage in multi-modal context retrieval, combining their individual insights to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the document's content. This collaborative approach enables the system to synthesize information from both textual and visual components, leading to improved accuracy in question answering. Preliminary experiments on five benchmarks like MMLongBench, LongDocURL demonstrate the effectiveness of our MDocAgent, achieve an average improvement of 12.1% compared to current state-of-the-art method. This work contributes to the development of more robust and comprehensive DocQA systems capable of handling the complexities of real-world documents containing rich textual and visual information. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/MDocAgent.