DR-MMSearchAgent: Deepening Reasoning in Multimodal Search Agents

arXiv cs.CV / 4/22/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper identifies two causes of “premature interaction collapse” in agentic multimodal search models: terminal-only reward signals and overly redundant context that prevents effective feedback learning.
  • It proposes the DR-MMSearchAgent framework to compute advantage signals from entire rollout trajectories across a batch using structural proximity, encouraging trajectories with varying lengths even if they reach the same correct answer.
  • The approach also introduces differentiated Gaussian reward calibration to dynamically adjust interaction tolerance, aiming to improve information reliability while reducing redundancy.
  • To train multi-turn deep reasoning, the authors build a multi-step dataset of 3,602 high-quality QA pairs requiring at least three reasoning steps.
  • Experiments report state-of-the-art results, including an 8.4% improvement over MMSearch-R1 on the FVQA-test benchmark.

Abstract

Agentic multimodal models have garnered significant attention for their ability to leverage external tools to tackle complex tasks. However, it is observed that such agents often meet premature interaction collapse, caused by two primary reasons: 1) the terminal reward often appending on the last token prevents the advantage from distinguishing trajectories with exploratory behavior; 2) excessively redundant context hinders the agent from absorbing useful feedback. To address these issues, we propose the Deepening Reasoning MMSearchAgent, the framework leverages the structural proximity to derive advantage signals from the whole rollout trajectories in an entire batch, such that trajectories of different lengths are further encouraged to be generated, even when containing the same correct answer. Additionally, differentiated gaussian rewards are employed to dynamically calibrate interaction tolerance, thereby ensuring information reliability and reduce redundancy. To support multi-turn interaction training, we have constructed a multi-step deep-reasoning dataset including 3602 high-quality QA pair with at least 3 reasonning steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming the MMSearch-R1 by 8.4\% on FVQA-test.

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