MERRIN:嘈杂网络环境中的多模态证据检索与推理基准
阅读原文· arxiv.org研究团队发布MERRIN基准,评估搜索增强智能体在嘈杂网络环境中的多模态证据检索与推理能力。该基准涵盖视频、音频等未充分探索模态,要求智能体在无明确模态提示的查询下检索复杂且常含噪声或冲突的证据。测试显示,10个模型(包括GPT-5.4-mini、Gemini 3/3.1及Qwen3系列)平均准确率仅22.3%,最佳达40.1%。研究发现,强智能体虽表现更优,但因过度探索导致资源消耗高而准确率提升有限,且相比人类存在信源选择低效和过度依赖文本模态的问题。
Motivated by the underspecified, multi-hop nature of search queries and the multimodal, heterogeneous, and often conflicting nature of real-world web results, we introduce MERRIN (Multimodal Evidence Retrieval and Reasoning in Noisy Web Environments), a human-annotated benchmark for evaluating search-augmented agents. MERRIN measures AI agents' ability to identify relevant modalities, retrieve multimodal evidence, and perform multi-hop reasoning over noisy web sources. It differs from prior work in three important aspects: (1) using natural language queries without explicit modality cues, (2) incorporating underexplored modalities such as video and audio, and (3) requiring the retrieval of complex, often noisy or conflicting multimodal evidence during web search. We evaluate diverse search agents powered by ten models, including strong closed-source models (e.g., GPT-5.4-mini, Gemini 3/3.1 Flash/Pro) and open-weight models (Qwen3-4B/30B/235B), across three search settings (no search, native search, and agentic search). Our results show that MERRIN is highly challenging: the average accuracy across all agents is 22.3%, with the best-performing agent reaching only 40.1%. We further observe that while stronger agents like Gemini Deep Research achieve higher performance, gains are modest due to over-exploration; they take more steps and use more tools, but are often distracted by conflicting or partially relevant web content, leading to incorrect answers. Compared to humans, these agents consume more resources yet achieve lower accuracy, largely due to inefficient source selection and an overreliance on text modalities. These findings highlight the need for search agents capable of robust search and reasoning across diverse modalities in noisy web environments, making MERRIN a valuable testbed for evaluating such capabilities.