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arXiv · 2607.19793

Silent Failures in Multimodal Agentic Search:A Diagnostic Taxonomy and Cross-Judge Evaluation

Zhengxian Wu·Junjie Gao·Kai Yang
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Abstract

Multimodal agentic search systems increasingly rely on external tools to answer knowledge-intensive visual questions. However, existing evaluations mainly focus on final-answer accuracy and may miss failures in the search trajectory. In this work, we study such hidden reliability issues as silent failures. We introduce a six-category taxonomy covering modality shortcuts, phantom grounding, wrong-evidence-right-answer cases, over-retrieval laundering, cross-modal contradiction, and provenance hallucination. Based on this taxonomy, we build a trajectory-level diagnostic pipeline that evaluates both answer correctness and evidence-grounding quality under a unified ReAct-style scaffold. Experiments on MMSearch-Plus trajectories across four frontier multimodal models show that surface accuracy consistently overestimates true trajectory-level correctness. We further use cross-judge validation, blank-image stress tests, and tool ablations to show that silent failures are capability-dependent and often shift rather than disappear. Home-page: https://github.com/DingWu1021/silent-failures-multimodal-agentic-search

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Zhengxian Wu, Junjie Gao, Kai Yang. 2026-07-22. Silent Failures in Multimodal Agentic Search:A Diagnostic Taxonomy and Cross-Judge Evaluation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19793

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