MMSearch: Benchmarking the Potential of Large Models as Multi-modal Search Engines
read the original abstract
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has paved the way for AI search engines, e.g., SearchGPT, showcasing a new paradigm in human-internet interaction. However, most current AI search engines are limited to text-only settings, neglecting the multimodal user queries and the text-image interleaved nature of website information. Recently, Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have made impressive strides. Yet, whether they can function as AI search engines remains under-explored, leaving the potential of LMMs in multimodal search an open question. To this end, we first design a delicate pipeline, MMSearch-Engine, to empower any LMMs with multimodal search capabilities. On top of this, we introduce MMSearch, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark to assess the multimodal search performance of LMMs. The curated dataset contains 300 manually collected instances spanning 14 subfields, which involves no overlap with the current LMMs' training data, ensuring the correct answer can only be obtained within searching. By using MMSearch-Engine, the LMMs are evaluated by performing three individual tasks (requery, rerank, and summarization), and one challenging end-to-end task with a complete searching process. We conduct extensive experiments on closed-source and open-source LMMs. Among all tested models, GPT-4o with MMSearch-Engine achieves the best results, which surpasses the commercial product, Perplexity Pro, in the end-to-end task, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed pipeline. We further present error analysis to unveil current LMMs still struggle to fully grasp the multimodal search tasks, and conduct ablation study to indicate the potential of scaling test-time computation for AI search engine. We hope MMSearch may provide unique insights to guide the future development of multimodal AI search engine. Project Page: https://mmsearch.github.io
This paper has not been read by Pith yet.
Forward citations
Cited by 29 Pith papers
-
SVFSearch: A Multimodal Knowledge-Intensive Benchmark for Short-Video Frame Search in the Gaming Vertical Domain
SVFSearch is the first open benchmark for short-video frame search in the Chinese gaming domain, with evaluations showing direct QA at 66.4%, best practical agents at 79.1%, and oracle knowledge at 95.4%.
-
Data Journalist Agent: Transforming Data into Verifiable Multimodal Stories
Data2Story is a multi-agent framework that generates evidence-grounded multimodal articles from data, evaluated on 18 articles against human pieces for verifiability, angle coverage, and quality across human, rubric, ...
-
PIXELRAG: Web Screenshots Beat Text for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
PixelRAG shows that operating RAG entirely over web screenshots outperforms text-based retrieval on NQ, SimpleQA, MMSearch, LiveVQA, and MoNaCo, with up to 18.1% accuracy gains and 3x token savings via image compression.
-
SVFSearch: A Multimodal Knowledge-Intensive Benchmark for Short-Video Frame Search in the Gaming Vertical Domain
SVFSearch is the first open benchmark for short-video frame search in the Chinese gaming domain, providing a frozen retrieval environment and showing performance gaps of 13-29 points between direct QA models, practica...
-
FIKA-Bench: From Fine-grained Recognition to Fine-Grained Knowledge Acquisition
FIKA-Bench is a leakage-aware benchmark of 311 instances showing that even the best large multimodal models and tool-equipped agents reach only 25.1% accuracy on fine-grained recognition questions that require externa...
-
FIKA-Bench: From Fine-grained Recognition to Fine-Grained Knowledge Acquisition
FIKA-Bench shows that the best large multimodal models and tool-using agents reach only 25.1% accuracy on fine-grained knowledge acquisition, with failures driven by wrong retrieval and poor visual judgment.
-
From Web to Pixels: Bringing Agentic Search into Visual Perception
WebEye benchmark and Pixel-Searcher agent enable visual perception tasks by using web search to resolve object identities before precise localization or answering.
-
Very Efficient Listwise Multimodal Reranking for Long Documents
ZipRerank delivers state-of-the-art multimodal listwise reranking accuracy for long documents at up to 10x lower latency via early interaction and single-pass scoring.
-
Towards On-Policy Data Evolution for Visual-Native Multimodal Deep Search Agents
A new image-bank harness and closed-loop on-policy data evolution method raises multimodal agent performance on visual search benchmarks from 24.9% to 39.0% for an 8B model and from 30.6% to 41.5% for a 30B model.
-
HyperEyes: Dual-Grained Efficiency-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Parallel Multimodal Search Agents
HyperEyes uses a dual-grained RL framework with parallel tool actions and efficiency rewards to achieve 9.9% higher accuracy and 5.3x fewer tool calls than prior open-source multimodal agents.
-
VISOR: Agentic Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Iterative Search and Over-horizon Reasoning
VISOR is a unified agentic VRAG framework with Evidence Space structuring, visual action evaluation/correction, and dynamic sliding-window trajectories trained via GRPO-based RL that achieves SOTA performance on long-...
-
Watching, Reasoning, and Searching: A Video Deep Research Benchmark on Open Web for Agentic Video Reasoning
VideoDR is a new benchmark for open-web video deep research that tests multimodal models on cross-frame visual anchor extraction, interactive retrieval, and multi-hop reasoning over joint video-web evidence.
-
Training Multi-Image Vision Agents via End2End Reinforcement Learning
IMAgent trains a multi-image vision agent via pure end-to-end RL with visual reflection tools and a two-layer motion trajectory masking strategy, reaching SOTA on single- and multi-image benchmarks while revealing too...
-
MMSearch-R1: Incentivizing LMMs to Search
MMSearch-R1 uses reinforcement learning to train multimodal models for on-demand multi-turn internet search with image and text tools, outperforming same-size RAG baselines and matching larger ones while cutting searc...
-
Ground Then Rank: Revisiting Knowledge-Based VQA with Training-Free Entity Identification
A decoupled training-free IBA framework for KB-VQA selects entities via MLLM candidate choice then ranks evidence with off-the-shelf re-rankers, outperforming coupled fine-tuned baselines on Encyclopedic-VQA and InfoSeek.
-
TAPO: Tool-Aware Policy Optimization via Credit Transfer for Multimodal Search Agents
TAPO corrects credit misassignment in RL for multimodal search agents by using tool parameter similarity to share advantages across equivalent actions.
-
Agent Explorative Policy Optimization for Multimodal Agentic Reasoning
AXPO addresses the Thinking-Acting Gap in agentic RL training by targeted resampling of tool calls in all-wrong subgroups, delivering +1.8pp gains over GRPO on nine multimodal benchmarks with an 8B model beating a 32B...
-
HyperEyes: Dual-Grained Efficiency-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Parallel Multimodal Search Agents
HyperEyes presents a parallel multimodal search agent using dual-grained efficiency-aware RL with a new TRACE reward and IMEB benchmark, claiming 9.9% higher accuracy and 5.3x fewer tool calls than prior open-source agents.
-
DR-MMSearchAgent: Deepening Reasoning in Multimodal Search Agents
DR-MMSearchAgent derives batch-wide trajectory advantages and uses differentiated Gaussian rewards to prevent premature collapse in multimodal agents, outperforming MMSearch-R1 by 8.4% on FVQA-test.
-
Towards Long-horizon Agentic Multimodal Search
LMM-Searcher uses file-based visual UIDs and a fetch tool plus 12K synthesized trajectories to fine-tune a multimodal agent that scales to 100-turn horizons and reaches SOTA among open-source models on MM-BrowseComp a...
-
DeepEyesV2: Toward Agentic Multimodal Model
DeepEyesV2 uses a two-stage cold-start plus reinforcement learning pipeline to produce an agentic multimodal model that adaptively invokes tools and outperforms direct RL on real-world reasoning benchmarks.
-
WebWatcher: Breaking New Frontier of Vision-Language Deep Research Agent
WebWatcher introduces a vision-language deep research agent trained on synthetic multimodal trajectories and RL that outperforms baselines on VQA benchmarks, along with a new BrowseComp-VL evaluation.
-
MathVis-Fine: Aligning Visual Supervision with Necessity via Progressive Dependency-Guided Training for Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning
MathVis-Fine proposes a dataset with fine-grained visual annotations and dependency ratings plus a progressive two-stage training paradigm to align visual supervision with sample-specific necessity in multimodal mathe...
-
Towards On-Policy Data Evolution for Visual-Native Multimodal Deep Search Agents
Proposes image-bank harness and ODE closed-loop data generation to boost multimodal deep search agents, reporting average score gains from 24.9% to 39.0% on 8 benchmarks for 8B model and 30.6% to 41.5% for 30B.
-
GLM-5V-Turbo: Toward a Native Foundation Model for Multimodal Agents
GLM-5V-Turbo integrates multimodal perception as a core part of reasoning and execution for agentic tasks, reporting strong results in visual tool use and multimodal coding while keeping text-only performance competitive.
-
ProMMSearchAgent: A Generalizable Multimodal Search Agent Trained with Process-Oriented Rewards
A sandbox-trained multimodal search agent with process-oriented rewards transfers zero-shot to real Google Search and outperforms prior methods on FVQA, InfoSeek, and MMSearch.
-
Valley3: Scaling Omni Foundation Models for E-commerce
Valley3 is an omni MLLM for e-commerce that uses a four-stage pre-training pipeline plus post-training for controllable reasoning and agentic search, outperforming baselines on e-commerce benchmarks while staying comp...
-
GLM-5V-Turbo: Toward a Native Foundation Model for Multimodal Agents
GLM-5V-Turbo integrates multimodal perception directly into reasoning, planning, tool use, and execution for agents, yielding strong results in multimodal coding and framework-based tasks while keeping text coding com...
-
GLM-5V-Turbo: Toward a Native Foundation Model for Multimodal Agents
GLM-5V-Turbo integrates multimodal perception directly into reasoning and agent workflows, reporting strong results on visual tool use, multimodal coding, and framework-based agent tasks while keeping text coding competitive.
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.