Visual-Seeker: Towards Visual-Native Multimodal Agentic Search via Active Visual Reasoning
On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning
also in 2 more
Abstract (arXiv)
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in many visual tasks, but they often struggle with factual grounding when confronted with complex, open-world scenarios. While recent multimodal deep search agents attempt to address this issue by utilizing external tools, the visual-native search paradigm remains underexplored. Existing methods primarily rely on simple images with explicit semantics and text-only evidence trajectories, limiting the agent's ability to perform multi-hop, cross-modal reasoning and search. To address these limitations, we propose Visual-Seeker, a visual-native multimodal deep search agent via active visual reasoning. Rather than treating vision as a static input, our agent actively attends to fine-grained visual details, dynamically harvests visual evidence throughout the search process. To unlock its visual-native potential, we design an active visual reasoning data pipeline and synthesize 5K high-quality multimodal trajectories for model training. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance across five challenging multimodal search benchmarks, even surpassing several proprietary models, validating robust visual-native reasoning and search in real-world web environments. The code and data can be accessed at: https://github.com/ZhengboZhang/Visual-Seeker.
Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 24 of its 29 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Jun 2026.
Builds on
24 of 29 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2025SenseNova-MARS: Empowering Multimodal Agentic Reasoning and Search via Reinforcement Learning30 Dec
- 2025MMSearch-Plus: Benchmarking Provenance-Aware Search for Multimodal Browsing Agents29 Aug
Other references · 22
- 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,534
- 2025Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,371
- 2025OpenAI GPT-5 System Cardcited by 910
- 2023Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Modelscited by 810
- 2024SWIFT:A Scalable lightWeight Infrastructure for Fine-Tuningcited by 345
- 2025MMSearch-R1: Incentivizing LMMs to Searchcited by 120
- 2025DeepEyesV2: Toward Agentic Multimodal Modelcited by 119
- 2025WebWatcher: Breaking New Frontier of Vision-Language Deep Research Agentcited by 114
- 2024MMSearch: Benchmarking the Potential of Large Models as Multi-modal Search Enginescited by 98
- 2025WebSailor-V2: Bridging the Chasm to Proprietary Agents via Synthetic Data and Scalable Reinforcement Learningcited by 59
- 2025Tongyi DeepResearch Technical Reportcited by 53
- 2025DeepMMSearch-R1: Empowering Multimodal LLMs in Multimodal Web Searchcited by 41
10 more
- 2025MM-BrowseComp: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Browsing Agentscited by 39
- 2026Vision-DeepResearch: Incentivizing DeepResearch Capability in Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 33
- 2025Skywork-R1V4: Toward Agentic Multimodal Intelligence through Interleaved Thinking with Images and DeepResearchcited by 25
- 2025Seeking and Updating with Live Visual Knowledgecited by 23
- 2026MM-DeepResearch: A Simple and Effective Multimodal Agentic Search Baselinecited by 18
- 2026OpenSearch-VL: An Open Recipe for Frontier Multimodal Search Agentscited by 18
- 2025BrowserAgent: Building Web Agents with Human-Inspired Web Browsing Actionscited by 17
- 2026VisBrowse-Bench: Benchmarking Visual-Native Search for Multimodal Browsing Agentscited by 8
- 2026VSearcher: Long-Horizon Multimodal Search Agent via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6
- 2026POINTS-Seeker: An Open Recipe for Multimodal Search Agents with Visual Memory Managementcited by 1
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 5.
5 papers.
- 2026SimpleSearch-VL: A Simple Recipe for Multimodal Agentic Deep Searchcited by 1
- 2026MMShopBench: A Real-Log Benchmark for Multimodal, Multi-Turn Shopping Agentscited by 0
- 2026DeepVoyager-VL: Incentivizing Vision-in-the-Loop Search for Long-Horizon Multimodal Agentscited by 0
- 2026VisDocAgentBench: Benchmarking Agents for Visually Rich Document Retrievalcited by 0
- 2026AdaVDR: Adaptive Tool Use and Reflection for Video Deep Researchcited by 0
- 2026AdaVDR: Adaptive Tool Use and Reflection for Video Deep Research26 Aug 2026
- 2026VisDocAgentBench: Benchmarking Agents for Visually Rich Document Retrieval18 Aug 2026
- 2026DeepVoyager-VL: Incentivizing Vision-in-the-Loop Search for Long-Horizon Multimodal Agents3 Aug 2026
- 2026MMShopBench: A Real-Log Benchmark for Multimodal, Multi-Turn Shopping Agents31 Jul 2026
- 2026SimpleSearch-VL: A Simple Recipe for Multimodal Agentic Deep Search30 Jun 2026
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