English

Towards Verifiable Multimodal Deep Research: A Multi-Agent Harness for Interleaved Report Generation

Computation and Language 2026-05-29 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced autonomous agents from deep search, which retrieves concise factual answers, to deep research, which synthesizes scattered evidence into long-form reports. However, verifiable multimodal deep research remains challenging due to open-ended synthesis without deterministic ground truth and the need to interleave textual arguments with visual evidence. We propose \textsc{Ptah}, a multi-agent harness for interleaved report generation. \textsc{Ptah} orchestrates the lifecycle from user query to rendered web report through planning, research, and writing stages, where specialized agents construct visual-aware plans, collect claim-grounded evidence, maintain source-aligned images in a \textit{Visual Working Memory}, and compose reports through declarative multimodal tool use. A verifier agent serves as the harness's acceptance function, enforcing factual grounding, citation fidelity, and cross-modal consistency throughout the workflow. We further introduce \textsc{Ptah}Eval, an evaluation protocol that augments existing benchmarks with image-level and presentation-level assessments. Experiments on deep research benchmarks show that \textsc{Ptah} produces more reliable, visually informative, and usable human-facing multimodal reports than strong baselines.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.29861,
  title  = {Towards Verifiable Multimodal Deep Research: A Multi-Agent Harness for Interleaved Report Generation},
  author = {Chenghao Zhang and Guanting Dong and Yufan Liu and Tong Zhao and Zhicheng Dou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.29861},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:39:32.421Z