mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Skywork-R1V4: Toward Agentic Multimodal Intelligence through Interleaved Thinking with Images and DeepResearch

arXiv 2512.02395 ↗First posted 2 Dec 2025cs.CVcited by 25

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Multimodal and embodied agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Despite recent progress in multimodal agentic systems, existing approaches often treat image manipulation and web search as disjoint capabilities, rely heavily on costly reinforcement learning, and lack planning grounded in real tool-execution traces. To address these limitations, we present Skywork-R1V4, a 30B (A3B) parameter multimodal agentic model that unifies multimodal planning, active image manipulation ("thinking with images"), deep multimodal search, and, most critically, interleaved reasoning that dynamically alternates between visual operations and external knowledge retrieval. Trained solely via supervised fine-tuning on fewer than 30,000 high-quality, planning-execution-consistent trajectories and validated through stepwise consistency filtering, Skywork-R1V4 achieves state-of-the-art results across perception and multimodal search benchmarks: it scores 66.1 on MMSearch and 67.2 on FVQA, surpassing Gemini 2.5 Flash on all 11 metrics. Skywork-R1V4 exhibits emergent long-horizon reasoning at inference time, successfully orchestrating more than 10 tool calls to solve complex, multi-step tasks. Our results demonstrate that sophisticated agentic multimodal intelligence can be achieved through carefully curated supervised learning alone, without any reliance on reinforcement learning.

Key facts. Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal and embodied agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 36 of its 42 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Dec 2025.

Builds on

36 of 42 references.

Closest ancestors · 3

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025WebWatcher: Breaking New Frontier of Vision-Language Deep Research Agent7 Aug
  2. 2025PyVision: Agentic Vision with Dynamic Tooling10 Jul
  3. 2025CogPlanner: Unveiling the Potential of Agentic Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation with Planning26 Jan

Other references · 33

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  2. 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,146
  3. 2025Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,371
  4. 2025Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 653
  5. 2025VLM-R1: A Stable and Generalizable R1-style Large Vision-Language Modelcited by 515
  6. 2025Visual-RFT: Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuningcited by 501
  7. 2023V*: Guided Visual Search as a Core Mechanism in Multimodal LLMscited by 459
  8. 2025GLM-4.5: Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding (ARC) Foundation Modelscited by 446
  9. 2024VLMEvalKit: An Open-Source Toolkit for Evaluating Large Multi-Modality Modelscited by 443
  10. 2025Search-o1: Agentic Search-Enhanced Large Reasoning Modelscited by 423
  11. 2025ReTool: Reinforcement Learning for Strategic Tool Use in LLMscited by 377
  12. 2024MME-RealWorld: Could Your Multimodal LLM Challenge High-Resolution Real-World Scenarios that are Difficult for Humans?cited by 284
21 more
  1. 2025LMM-R1: Empowering 3B LMMs with Strong Reasoning Abilities Through Two-Stage Rule-Based RLcited by 244
  2. 2025Thinking with Images for Multimodal Reasoning: Foundations, Methods, and Future Frontierscited by 193
  3. 2016FVQA: Fact-based Visual Question Answeringcited by 181
  4. 2025Thyme: Think Beyond Imagescited by 160
  5. 2024Divide, Conquer and Combine: A Training-Free Framework for High-Resolution Image Perception in Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 151
  6. 2025MMSearch-R1: Incentivizing LMMs to Searchcited by 120
  7. 2025Mini-o3: Scaling Up Reasoning Patterns and Interaction Turns for Visual Searchcited by 116
  8. 2024MMSearch: Benchmarking the Potential of Large Models as Multi-modal Search Enginescited by 98
  9. 2025Thinking with Generated Imagescited by 71
  10. 2025Skywork R1V: Pioneering Multimodal Reasoning with Chain-of-Thoughtcited by 69
  11. 2025Traceable Evidence Enhanced Visual Grounded Reasoning: Evaluation and Methodologycited by 67
  12. 2025R1-Reward: Training Multimodal Reward Model Through Stable Reinforcement Learningcited by 65
  13. 2025FineVision: Open Data Is All You Needcited by 51
  14. 2025Skywork R1V2: Multimodal Hybrid Reinforcement Learning for Reasoningcited by 48
  15. 2025Latent Sketchpad: Sketching Visual Thoughts to Elicit Multimodal Reasoning in MLLMscited by 41
  16. 2025Skywork UniPic 2.0: Building Kontext Model with Online RL for Unified Multimodal Modelcited by 38
  17. 2025LLaVA-Critic-R1: Your Critic Model is Secretly a Strong Policy Modelcited by 34
  18. 2025Skywork-VL Reward: An Effective Reward Model for Multimodal Understanding and Reasoningcited by 30
  19. 2025Skywork-R1V3 Technical Reportcited by 16
  20. 2025Skywork UniPic: Unified Autoregressive Modeling for Visual Understanding and Generationcited by 16
  21. 2025DeepPlanner: Scaling Planning Capability for Deep Research Agents via Advantage Shapingcited by 5

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 2; 2026: 23.

25 papers.

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  1. 2026Vision-OPD: Learning to See Fine Details for Multimodal LLMs via On-Policy Self-Distillationcited by 71
  2. 2026Zooming without Zooming: Region-to-Image Distillation for Fine-Grained Multimodal Perceptioncited by 47
  3. 2025SenseNova-MARS: Empowering Multimodal Agentic Reasoning and Search via Reinforcement Learningcited by 31
  4. 2026OpenSearch-VL: An Open Recipe for Frontier Multimodal Search Agentscited by 18
  5. 2026Act Wisely: Cultivating Meta-Cognitive Tool Use in Agentic Multimodal Modelscited by 13
  6. 2026What Does Vision Tool-Use Reinforcement Learning Really Learn? Disentangling Tool-Induced and Intrinsic Effects for Crop-and-Zoomcited by 9
  7. 2026VisBrowse-Bench: Benchmarking Visual-Native Search for Multimodal Browsing Agentscited by 8
  8. 2026HyperEyes: Dual-Grained Efficiency-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Parallel Multimodal Search Agentscited by 8
  9. 2026S1-VL: Scientific Multimodal Reasoning Model with Thinking-with-Imagescited by 5
  10. 2026Visual-Seeker: Towards Visual-Native Multimodal Agentic Search via Active Visual Reasoningcited by 5
  11. 2025Training Multi-Image Vision Agents via End2End Reinforcement Learningcited by 4
  12. 2026Agentic-MME: What Agentic Capability Really Brings to Multimodal Intelligence?cited by 4
13 more
  1. 2026S1-DeepResearch: Beyond Search, Toward Real-World Long-Horizon Research Agentscited by 3
  2. 2026PixelEyes: Decoupling Perception and Reasoning for Pinpoint Visual Evidence Seekingcited by 2
  3. 2026Thinking With Tools, Not With Pixels: Tool Calls as Text Scaffolds for Visual Reasoningcited by 2
  4. 2026SpecEyes: Accelerating Agentic Multimodal LLMs via Speculative Perception and Planningcited by 1
  5. 2026VESTA: Visual Exploration with Statistical Tool Agentscited by 1
  6. 2026TAPO: Tool-Aware Policy Optimization via Credit Transfer for Multimodal Search Agentscited by 1
  7. 2026Beyond the Eye: Efficient Multimodal Reasoning via Self-Regulated Implicit Visual Toolscited by 1
  8. 2026OpenVisTool: An Open Recipe for Synthesizing Instructive Visual Tool-Use Trajectoriescited by 1
  9. 2026A Task-Driven Evaluation of UAV Detection and Tracking under Synthetic Fogcited by 0
  10. 2026UNIBROWSE: A Data-to-Agent Framework for Multimodal BrowseCompcited by 0
  11. 2026DeepVoyager-VL: Incentivizing Vision-in-the-Loop Search for Long-Horizon Multimodal Agentscited by 0
  12. 2026WeAgent-MMSearch: Native Text-Vision Interaction for Multimodal Search Agentscited by 0
  13. 2026Selection-Based Structured Reasoning: Toward Efficient Multimodal Search Agentscited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025InSight-o3: Empowering Multimodal Foundation Models with Generalized Visual Search
  2. 2025DeepEyesV2: Toward Agentic Multimodal Model
  3. 2025Agent-X: Evaluating Deep Multimodal Reasoning in Vision-Centric Agentic Tasks
  4. 2026Towards Long-horizon Agentic Multimodal Search
  5. 2026LiteSearch-VL: Small Multimodal Search Agents via Trajectory Distillation and Synthetic Step-DPO
  6. 2025ThinkMorph: Emergent Properties in Multimodal Interleaved Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
  7. 2026ProMMSearchAgent: A Generalizable Multimodal Search Agent Trained with Process-Oriented Rewards
  8. 2026SimpleSearch-VL: A Simple Recipe for Multimodal Agentic Deep Search