Video-DeepResearch: Towards the Next-Generation Multimodal Deepresearch Agent
Abstract
We introduce Video-DeepResearch (Video-DR), extending multimodal agents from static images to continuous video streams, a setting that demands dense spatiotemporal grounding coupled with open-web exploration. Preliminary evaluations reveal two critical bottlenecks in current models: (1) modality bias, where agents bypass visual tools in favor of textual search, and (2) parametric knowledge leakage, where models rely on internal memory rather than genuine tool-augmented execution. To address these challenges, we propose Video-DR, featuring a decoupled perception-exploration pipeline with stage-wise tool unlocking that compels exhaustive cross-frame visual grounding prior to web retrieval. Our framework adopts a two-stage training recipe: supervised fine-tuning followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), enabling autonomous exploration that breaks the imitation-learning ceiling. Furthermore, we curate Video-DR-Bench, a human-AI collaborative benchmark comprising 200 complex, multi-hop VQA instances. Empirical results demonstrate that our Video-DeepResearch-35B-A3B establishes a new state-of-the-art of 64.0% average accuracy, surpassing proprietary Claude-4.5-Sonnet (59.0%) by 5.0 points and significantly outperforming GPT-5 (52.5%) and Gemini 2.5 Pro (57.5%). The 30B-A3B variant achieves 59.3%, competitive with Claude-4.5-Sonnet and demonstrating the effectiveness of our training paradigm even at compact scale. Code: https://github.com/Osilly/Vision-DeepResearch.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2608.03979,
title = {Video-DeepResearch: Towards the Next-Generation Multimodal Deepresearch Agent},
author = {Zhen Fang and Yu Zeng and Wenxuan Huang and Yiming Zhao and Shiting Huang and Tianfei Ren and Qi Lu and Qingnan Ren and Qisheng Su and Lionel Z. Wang and Qingyu Yin and Shuang Chen and Zehui Chen and Lin Chen and Zhenfei Yin and Yao Hu and Shaohui Lin and Wanli Ouyang and Shaosheng Cao and Feng Zhao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.03979},
year = {2026}
}