# Visual Orchestration Tax in Agentic VLM Pipelines: Auditing and Certifying Visual Evidence Reuse

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08170 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08170/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal and embodied agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 6 of its 12 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [GAM-Agent: Game-Theoretic and Uncertainty-Aware Collaboration for Complex Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23399/) (2025)
- [KVCOMM: Online Cross-context KV-cache Communication for Efficient LLM-based Multi-agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12872/) (2025)
- [VLCache: Computing 2% Vision Tokens and Reusing 98% for Vision-Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12977/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Information Synthesis in Multimodal Question Answering A Multi-Agent Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20816/) (2025)
- [SeeingEye: Agentic Information Flow Unlocks Multimodal Reasoning In Text-only LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25092/) (2025)
- [Visual Para-Thinker++: A Single-Policy Multi-Agent Framework for Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09290/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Agentic VLM pipelines increasingly pass the same static visual evidence through multiple specialist agents and tools. This design creates an orchestration-level redundancy mode: semantically unchanged images are repeatedly reconstructed as image-conditioned requests at the VLM API boundary. We call this phenomenon visual orchestration tax and develop a measurement-to-certification framework for visual evidence reuse in agentic VLM pipelines. The audit side defines M1trace to count raw visual-evidence touches and M2 to measure structural touch redundancy, with query-level distributions, bootstrap confidence intervals, and paired quality tests. Across SeeingEye and MAMMQA on chart, document, general-VQA, and multi-modal-QA tasks, audits reveal 66.8-75.6% visual-evidence touch redundancy, and every audited query exceeds the predefined gate. The certification side introduces SharedVisCache, a contract-aware evidence reuse hook keyed by image content, preprocessing fingerprint, and encoder assumptions. On SeeingEye, contract validation certifies 75.0-75.5% repeated touches as reusable while preserving 350/350 output strings and DeltaM5=0. At the physical layer, certified hits reduce Fvision from 800 to 200 in ChartQA-200 trace replay and from 200 to 50 inside live SeeingEye translator-stage physical integration, preserving 800/800 replay strings and 200/200 integrated call outputs. The results position visual reuse as a measurable, behavior-preserving property of agent orchestration and define an agent-layer contract that makes backend prefix or token reuse semantically interpretable.