# MultiPress: A Multi-Agent Framework for Interpretable Multimodal News Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03586 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03586/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agentic RAG, agents and memory, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 25 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Agentic RAG, agents and memory](https://mlsanity.com/rag/agentic-rag-agents-and-memory/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03629/) (2022)
- [AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08155/) (2023)
- [MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00352/) (2023)
- [The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07864/) (2023)
- [CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17760/) (2023)
- [ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12793/) (2024)
- [mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14178/) (2023)
- [N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13327/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08748/) (2025)
- [HM-RAG: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12330/) (2025)
- [Seeing Across Views: Benchmarking Spatial Reasoning of Vision-Language Models in Robotic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19400/) (2025)
- [HSSBench: Benchmarking Humanities and Social Sciences Ability for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03922/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Multi-Agent Empowered Legal Judgment Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12815/) (2026)
- [Multi-RAG: A Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation System for Adaptive Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23990/) (2025)
- [EDIS: Diagnosing LLM Reasoning via Entropy Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01288/) (2026)
- [How Order-Sensitive Are LLMs? OrderProbe for Deterministic Structural Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08626/) (2026)
- [QuantEval: A Benchmark for Financial Quantitative Tasks in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08689/) (2026)
- [ReasonAct: Progressive Training for Fine-Grained Video Reasoning in Small Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01533/) (2025)
- [LaoBench: A Large-Scale Multidimensional Lao Benchmark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11334/) (2025)

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

- [RCBSF: A Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Contract Revision via Stackelberg Game](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10740/) (2026)
- [LightAIR: Lightweight Action Inversion and Riemannian Rectification for Text-based Person Anomaly Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09152/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the growing prevalence of multimodal news content, effective news topic classification demands models capable of jointly understanding and reasoning over heterogeneous data such as text and images. Existing methods often process modalities independently or employ simplistic fusion strategies, limiting their ability to capture complex cross-modal interactions and leverage external knowledge. To overcome these limitations, we propose MultiPress, a novel three-stage multi-agent framework for multimodal news classification. MultiPress integrates specialized agents for multimodal perception, retrieval-augmented reasoning, and gated fusion scoring, followed by a reward-driven iterative optimization mechanism. We validate MultiPress on a newly constructed large-scale multimodal news dataset, demonstrating significant improvements over strong baselines and highlighting the effectiveness of modular multi-agent collaboration and retrieval-augmented reasoning in enhancing classification accuracy and interpretability.