Luyu Li | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

M3MAD-Bench: Multi-Dimensional Evaluation of Multi-Agent Debate Across Domains and Modalities

As an agent-level reasoning and coordination paradigm, Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) orchestrates multiple agents through structured debate to improve answer quality and support complex reasoning. However, existing research on MAD suffers from two fundamental limitations: evaluations are conducted under fragmented and inconsistent settings, making fair comparison difficult, and are largely confined to text-only scenarios, leaving its effectiveness in multimodal settings underexplored. To address these gaps, we introduce M3MAD-Bench, a unified and extensible benchmark for evaluating MAD methods across Multi-domain tasks, Multi-modal inputs, and Multi-dimensional metrics. M3MAD-Bench establishes standardized protocols over five core task domains, including Knowledge, Mathematics, Medicine, Natural Sciences, and Complex Reasoning, covering a total of 13 datasets, and systematically includes both pure text and vision-language data, enabling controlled cross-modality comparison. We evaluate MAD methods on 9 base models spanning different architectures, scales, and modality capabilities. Beyond accuracy, M3MAD-Bench incorporates efficiency-oriented metrics such as token consumption and inference time, providing a holistic view of performance--cost trade-offs. Through extensive experiments, we derive nine key insights, revealing that MAD is not uniformly effective: collaborative methods are generally more robust than adversarial ones, especially on reasoning-intensive and multimodal tasks, but often incur substantial efficiency costs. These findings provide practical guidance for selecting and designing MAD strategies in real-world applications. We believe M3MAD-Bench offers a reliable foundation for future research on standardized and reproducible MAD evaluation. The code is available at https://github.com/liaolea/M3MAD-Bench.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

GridPrune: From "Where to Look" to "What to Select" in Visual Token Pruning for MLLMs

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in a wide range of vision-language tasks. However, the large number of visual tokens introduces significant computational overhead. To address this issue, visual token pruning has emerged as a key technique for enhancing the efficiency of MLLMs. In cognitive science, humans tend to first determine which regions of a scene to attend to ("where to look") before deciding which specific elements within those regions to process in detail ("what to select"). This two-stage strategy enables the visual system to efficiently allocate attention at a coarse spatial level before performing fine-grained selection. However, existing pruning methods primarily focus on directly optimizing "what to select", typically using attention scores or similarity metrics. They rarely consider "where to look", which has been shown to lead to inefficient spatial allocation, positional bias, and the retention of irrelevant or redundant tokens. In this paper, we propose GridPrune, a method that replaces the global Top-K mechanism with a "guide-globally, select-locally" zonal selection system. GridPrune splits the pruning process into two steps: first, it uses text-conditional guidance to dynamically allocate a token budget across spatial zones; and then, it performs local selection within each budgeted zone. Experimental results demonstrate that GridPrune achieves superior performance across various MLLM architectures. On LLaVA-NeXT-7B, GridPrune retains 96.98% of the full performance while using 11.1% of the tokens, outperforming the best-performing baseline by 2.34% at the same pruning rate.

cs.CV↗