ModalSearcher: Weaving Visual Evidence into Autonomous Cross-Modal Deep Search

Zhihan Yin, Ruyi Li, Chengyu Fang, Yifeng Yao, Nonghai Zhang +4

Static and incomplete parametric knowledge limits the performance of multimodal large language models on novel-knowledge and knowledge-intensive tasks, especially those requiring multi-hop evidence acquisition. Existing multimodal agentic search methods often fix visual evidence at the input or a predefined trajectory position, making it difficult for agents to select search modalities as their information needs evolve and to handle complex real-world queries. We define this capability as autonomous cross-modal search: an agent chooses among direct reasoning, text-to-text search, text-to-image search, and reverse-image search, actively introduces visual evidence when appropriate, and switches between and integrates modalities across multiple hops. We propose ModalSearch-Pipeline, a scalable procedure for constructing an interleaved multimodal knowledge graph. It samples paths with diverse depths and modality compositions and uses backward question construction to obscure entity names and image targets that would expose reasoning shortcuts while retaining necessary disambiguating clues, yielding text-only, image-initialized, and arbitrarily interleaved multi-hop problems. We train…