mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Seeing Before Agreeing: Aligning Multi-Agent Consensus with Visual Evidence

arXiv 2605.30698 ↗First posted 29 May 2026cs.CV cs.AI cs.MAcited by 1

On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning

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Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on visual question answering (VQA). To mitigate individual hallucinations and blind spots, aggregating diverse perspectives via multi-agent collaboration has emerged as a promising paradigm. While this approach has shown great success in textual QA, its potential in the multimodal domain remains under-explored. Existing multi-agent VQA methods predominantly adapt text-centric protocols, focusing on textual discussions while ignoring the alignment of visual information. In this work, we reveal a key insight: answer-level agreement is insufficient for reliable multi-agent VQA; textitaligned visual evidence -- shared support from the image regions agents rely on -- is essential for trustworthy consensus. To leverage this insight, we propose EAGLE (Evidence-Aligned Grounded muLti-agent rEasoning), a training-free evidence-centered framework for coordinating multiple VLM agents. EAGLE explicitly exposes each agent's grounding regions as visual evidence, enables mutual verification over the evidence, and uses evidence consistency to guide final decision-making. Experiments on six VQA benchmarks show that EAGLE achieves best average performance across domains while remaining lightweight, interpretable, and practical for deployment.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 35 of its 84 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 May 2026.

Builds on

35 of 84 references.

Closest ancestors · 4

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025DART: Leveraging Multi-Agent Disagreement for Tool Recruitment in Multimodal Reasoning8 Dec
  2. 2025Argus: Vision-Centric Reasoning with Grounded Chain-of-Thought29 May
  3. 2025Rethinking Information Synthesis in Multimodal Question Answering A Multi-Agent Perspective27 May
  4. 2024MC-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-Context Visual Grounding in the Era of MLLMs16 Oct

Other references · 31

  1. 2023Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttentioncited by 5,767
  2. 2022Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasonerscited by 4,323
  3. 2023Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detectioncited by 3,274
  4. 2016Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answeringcited by 2,498
  5. 2023Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debatecited by 1,739
  6. 2025InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiencycited by 1,419
  7. 2023CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Societycited by 1,348
  8. 2023Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debatecited by 995
  9. 2024SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilitiescited by 679
  10. 2023V*: Guided Visual Search as a Core Mechanism in Multimodal LLMscited by 459
  11. 2025Multi-Agent Collaboration Mechanisms: A Survey of LLMscited by 424
  12. 2024YOLOv11: An Overview of the Key Architectural Enhancementscited by 414
19 more
  1. 2017Don't Just Assume; Look and Answer: Overcoming Priors for Visual Question Answeringcited by 337
  2. 2023ReConcile: Round-Table Conference Improves Reasoning via Consensus among Diverse LLMscited by 297
  3. 2023What's "up" with vision-language models? Investigating their struggle with spatial reasoningcited by 245
  4. 2024Enhancing the Reasoning Ability of Multimodal Large Language Models via Mixed Preference Optimizationcited by 238
  5. 2018Multimodal Explanations: Justifying Decisions and Pointing to the Evidencecited by 179
  6. 2025MLLMs Know Where to Look: Training-free Perception of Small Visual Details with Multimodal LLMscited by 172
  7. 2018Faithful Multimodal Explanation for Visual Question Answeringcited by 64
  8. 2025Voting or Consensus? Decision-Making in Multi-Agent Debatecited by 55
  9. 2018VQA-E: Explaining, Elaborating, and Enhancing Your Answers for Visual Questionscited by 50
  10. 2024Investigating and Mitigating the Multimodal Hallucination Snowballing in Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 31
  11. 2024CitaLaw: Enhancing LLM with Citations in Legal Domaincited by 16
  12. 2025Seeing is Believing, but How Much? A Comprehensive Analysis of Verbalized Calibration in Vision-Language Modelscited by 16
  13. 2025Localizing Before Answering: A Hallucination Evaluation Benchmark for Grounded Medical Multimodal LLMscited by 14
  14. 2024Uncovering the Full Potential of Visual Grounding Methods in VQAcited by 9
  15. 2024MME-Finance: A Multimodal Finance Benchmark for Expert-level Understanding and Reasoningcited by 7
  16. 2024On the Role of Visual Grounding in VQAcited by 5
  17. 2025Refine and Align: Confidence Calibration through Multi-Agent Interaction in VQAcited by 4
  18. 2026Evaluating and Calibrating LLM Confidence on Questions with Multiple Correct Answerscited by 3
  19. 2026Global Context or Local Detail? Adaptive Visual Grounding for Hallucination Mitigationcited by 1

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

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  1. 2023Towards Top-Down Reasoning: An Explainable Multi-Agent Approach for Visual Question Answering
  2. 2026A2Safe: Counterfactual Evidence-Aligned Adaptive Agent Collaboration for Safe and Effective Visual Question Answering
  3. 2024Multi-Agents Based on Large Language Models for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering
  4. 2025SeeingEye: Agentic Information Flow Unlocks Multimodal Reasoning In Text-only LLMs
  5. 2026VISTAQA: Benchmarking Joint Visual Question Answering and Pixel-Level Evidence
  6. 2024Multi-Agent VQA: Exploring Multi-Agent Foundation Models in Zero-Shot Visual Question Answering
  7. 2026ORCA: Orchestrated Reasoning with Collaborative Agents for Document Visual Question Answering
  8. 2026VTAgent: Agentic Keyframe Anchoring for Evidence-Aware Video TextVQA