Vision-DeepResearch: Incentivizing DeepResearch Capability in Multimodal Large Language Models
Wenxuan Huang, Yu Zeng, Qiuchen Wang, Zhen Fang, Shaosheng Cao, Zheng Chu, Qingyu Yin, Shuang Chen, Zhenfei Yin, Lin Chen, Zehui Chen, Yao Hu
Abstract
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a broad range of vision tasks. However, constrained by the capacity of their internal world knowledge, prior work has proposed augmenting MLLMs by "reasoning-then-tool-call" for visual and textual search engines to obtain substantial gains on tasks requiring extensive factual information. However, these approaches typically define multimodal search in a naive setting, assuming that a single full-level or entity-level image query and few text query suffices to retrieve the key evidence needed to answer the question, which is unrealistic in real-world scenarios with substantial visual noise. Moreover, they are often limited in the reasoning depth and search breadth, making it difficult to solve complex questions that require aggregating evidence from diverse visual and textual sources. Building on this, we propose Vision-DeepResearch, which proposes one new multimodal deep-research paradigm, i.e., performs multi-turn, multi-entity and multiscale visual and textual search to robustly hit realworld search engines under heavy noise. Our Vision-DeepResearch supports dozens of reasoning steps and hundreds of engine interactions, while internalizing deep-research capabilities into the MLLM via cold-start supervision and RL training, resulting in a strong end-to-end multimodal deep-research MLLM. It substantially outperforming existing multimodal deep-research MLLMs, and workflows built on strong closedsource foundation model such as GPT-5, Gemini-2.5-pro and Claude-4-Sonnet. The code will be released in https://github.com/Osilly/ Vision-DeepResearch .
Ask about this paper
Your agent reads all of it.
Lune indexed this paper to the last equation, along with the top-tier papers that cite it. Ask a question and the answer quotes them.
Cited by top-tier papers2
- Agentic Jigsaw Interaction Learning for Enhancing Visual Perception and Reasoning in Vision-Language ModelsYu Zeng, Wenxuan Huang, Shiting Huang, Xikun Bao et al.ICLR 2026 · 11 citations
- Navigating Massive Visual Context in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Multimodal Memory GraphQiuchen Wang, Shihang Wang, Yu Zeng, Qiang Zhang et al.ICML 2026 · 2 citations
Builds on7
- Visual Instruction TuningHaotian Liu, Chunyuan Li, Qingyang Wu, Yong Jae LeeNeurIPS 2023 · 11,349 citations
- Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language ModelsWenxuan Huang, Bohan Jia, Shaosheng Cao, Zheyu Ye et al.ICLR 2026 · 670 citations
- MMSearch-R1: Incentivizing LMMs to SearchJinming Wu, Zihao Deng, Wei Li, Yiding Liu et al.ACL 2026 · 93 citations
- MMSearch-Plus: Benchmarking Provenance-Aware Search for Multimodal Browsing AgentsXijia Tao, Yihua Teng, Xinxing Su, Xinyu Fu et al.ICLR 2026 · 37 citations
- Back to Basics: Revisiting REINFORCE-Style Optimization for Learning from Human Feedback in LLMsArash Ahmadian, Chris Cremer, Matthias Gallé, Marzieh Fadaee et al.ACL 2024 · 20 citations
Related papers
- ReSearch: Learning to Reason with Search for LLMs via Reinforcement LearningMingyang Chen, Linzhuang Sun, Tianpeng Li, Haoze Sun et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 125 citations
- M³-VQA: A Benchmark for Multimodal, Multi-Entity, Multi-Hop Visual Question AnsweringJiatong Ma, Longteng Guo, Yuchen Liu, Zijia Zhao et al.ACL 2026
- WebWatcher: Breaking New Frontiers of Vision-Language Deep Research AgentXinyu Geng, Peng Xia, Zhen Zhang, Xinyu Wang et al.ICLR 2026 · 79 citations
- OpenVLThinker: Complex Vision-Language Reasoning via Iterative SFT-RL CyclesYihe Deng, Hritik Bansal, Fan Yin, Nanyun Peng et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 61 citations
- MM-DeepResearch: A Simple and Effective Multimodal Agentic Search BaselineHuanjin Yao, Qixiang Yin, Min Yang, Ziwang Zhao et al.ICML 2026 · 14 citations
