Towards Verifiable Multimodal Deep Research: A Multi-Agent Harness for Interleaved Report Generation
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Web, search, and research agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced autonomous agents from deep search, which retrieves concise factual answers, to deep research, which synthesizes scattered evidence into long-form reports. However, verifiable multimodal deep research remains challenging due to open-ended synthesis without deterministic ground truth and the need to interleave textual arguments with visual evidence. We propose Ptah, a multi-agent harness for interleaved report generation. Ptah orchestrates the lifecycle from user query to rendered web report through planning, research, and writing stages, where specialized agents construct visual-aware plans, collect claim-grounded evidence, maintain source-aligned images in a Visual Working Memory, and compose reports through declarative multimodal tool use. A verifier agent serves as the harness's acceptance function, enforcing factual grounding, citation fidelity, and cross-modal consistency throughout the workflow. We further introduce PtahEval, an evaluation protocol that augments existing benchmarks with image-level and presentation-level assessments. Experiments on deep research benchmarks show that Ptah produces more reliable, visually informative, and usable human-facing multimodal reports than strong baselines. Our code is released at https://github.com/SnowNation101/Ptah
Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 29 of its 45 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 May 2026.
Builds on
29 of 45 references.
Closest ancestors · 5
Same direction, newest first
- 2025DeepWideSearch: Benchmarking Depth and Width in Agentic Information Seeking23 Oct
- 2025Lost in the Maze: Overcoming Context Limitations in Long-Horizon Agentic Search21 Oct
- 2025A Survey of LLM-based Deep Search Agents: Paradigm, Optimization, Evaluation, and Challenges3 Aug
- 2025DeepResearch Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Deep Research Agents13 Jun
- 2025WebDancer: Towards Autonomous Information Seeking Agency28 May
Other references · 24
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
- 2023InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Taskscited by 2,565
- 2023Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflectioncited by 1,839
- 2025Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,444
- 2023GAIA: a benchmark for General AI Assistantscited by 1,128
- 2022Measuring and Narrowing the Compositionality Gap in Language Modelscited by 1,075
- 2024Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Modelscited by 927
- 2025Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretrainingcited by 897
- 2025DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Modelscited by 815
- 2023NExT-GPT: Any-to-Any Multimodal LLMcited by 615
- 2024Executable Code Actions Elicit Better LLM Agentscited by 564
- 2023Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models with Iterative Retrieval-Generation Synergycited by 346
12 more
- 2025WebThinker: Empowering Large Reasoning Models with Deep Research Capabilitycited by 335
- 2024SEED-X: Multimodal Models with Unified Multi-granularity Comprehension and Generationcited by 331
- 2025WebWalker: Benchmarking LLMs in Web Traversalcited by 175
- 2024The Revolution of Multimodal Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 137
- 2025OWL: Optimized Workforce Learning for General Multi-Agent Assistance in Real-World Task Automationcited by 131
- 2024Prometheus-Vision: Vision-Language Model as a Judge for Fine-Grained Evaluationcited by 125
- 2025WebWatcher: Breaking New Frontier of Vision-Language Deep Research Agentcited by 119
- 2024MM-Interleaved: Interleaved Image-Text Generative Modeling via Multi-modal Feature Synchronizercited by 80
- 2026Agent-World: Scaling Real-World Environment Synthesis for Evolving General Agent Intelligencecited by 54
- 2024Interleaved Scene Graphs for Interleaved Text-and-Image Generation Assessmentcited by 21
- 2025Multimodal DeepResearcher: Generating Text-Chart Interleaved Reports From Scratch with Agentic Frameworkcited by 21
- 2025LLM-I: LLMs are Naturally Interleaved Multimodal Creatorscited by 6
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.
3 papers.
- 2026NoteVQA: Benchmarking VLMs on Real-Life Questions from Human Communitiescited by 0
- 2026SRHarness: A Harness for Agentic Symbolic Regressioncited by 0
- 2026LongCat-DeepResearch Technical Reportcited by 0
- 2026LongCat-DeepResearch Technical Report28 Sep 2026
- 2026SRHarness: A Harness for Agentic Symbolic Regression28 Sep 2026
- 2026NoteVQA: Benchmarking VLMs on Real-Life Questions from Human Communities14 Sep 2026
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