# XR: Cross-Modal Agents for Composed Image Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14245 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14245/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [SVAgent: Storyline-Guided Long Video Understanding via Cross-Modal Multi-Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05079/) (2026)
- [MultiHaystack: Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval and Reasoning over 40K Images, Videos, and Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05697/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Retrieval is being redefined by agentic AI, demanding multimodal reasoning beyond conventional similarity-based paradigms. Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) exemplifies this shift as each query combines a reference image with textual modifications, requiring compositional understanding across modalities. While embedding-based CIR methods have achieved progress, they remain narrow in perspective, capturing limited cross-modal cues and lacking semantic reasoning. To address these limitations, we introduce XR, a training-free multi-agent framework that reframes retrieval as a progressively coordinated reasoning process. It orchestrates three specialized types of agents: imagination agents synthesize target representations through cross-modal generation, similarity agents perform coarse filtering via hybrid matching, and question agents verify factual consistency through targeted reasoning for fine filtering. Through progressive multi-agent coordination, XR iteratively refines retrieval to meet both semantic and visual query constraints, achieving up to a 38% gain over strong training-free and training-based baselines on FashionIQ, CIRR, and CIRCO, while ablations show each agent is essential. Code is available: https://01yzzyu.github.io/xr.github.io/.