V-Retrver: Evidence-Driven Agentic Reasoning for Universal Multimodal Retrieval

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06034v1
• Date: Thu, 05 Feb 2026 18:59:21 GMT
• Title: V-Retrver: Evidence-Driven Agentic Reasoning for Universal Multimodal Retrieval
• Abstract summary: We propose V-Retrver, an evidence-driven retrieval framework that reformulates multimodal retrieval as an agentic reasoning process grounded in visual inspection.<n>V-Retrver enables an MLLM to selectively acquire visual evidence during reasoning via external visual tools, performing a multimodal interleaved reasoning process that alternates between hypothesis generation and targeted visual verification.
• Score: 32.5242219186118
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently been applied to universal multimodal retrieval, where Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning improves candidate reranking. However, existing approaches remain largely language-driven, relying on static visual encodings and lacking the ability to actively verify fine-grained visual evidence, which often leads to speculative reasoning in visually ambiguous cases. We propose V-Retrver, an evidence-driven retrieval framework that reformulates multimodal retrieval as an agentic reasoning process grounded in visual inspection. V-Retrver enables an MLLM to selectively acquire visual evidence during reasoning via external visual tools, performing a multimodal interleaved reasoning process that alternates between hypothesis generation and targeted visual verification.To train such an evidence-gathering retrieval agent, we adopt a curriculum-based learning strategy combining supervised reasoning activation, rejection-based refinement, and reinforcement learning with an evidence-aligned objective. Experiments across multiple multimodal retrieval benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in retrieval accuracy (with 23.0% improvements on average), perception-driven reasoning reliability, and generalization.

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