Seokgyu Jang

Namyoung So, Seokgyu Jang, Taeuk Kim

Adaptive multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly adopted to tackle complex problems.However, the narrow task coverage of their optimization raises the question of whether they can function as general-purpose systems.To address this gap, we conduct an extensive empirical study of adaptive MAS, revealing two key findings: (1) topological overfitting -- they fail to generalize across different domains; and (2) illusory coordination -- they achieve reasonable surface-level accuracy while the underlying agent interactions diverge from ideal MAS behavior, raising concerns about their practical utility.These findings highlight the pressing need to prioritize generalization in MAS development and motivate evaluation protocols that extend beyond simple final-answer correctness.

Seunghee Kim, Ingyu Bang, Seokgyu Jang et al.

Cross-modal multi-hop reasoning (CMR) is a valuable yet underexplored capability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), entailing the integration of information from multiple modalities to produce a coherent output for a given context. We argue that existing benchmarks for evaluating this ability have critical shortcomings: (1) they largely overlook the speech modality, and (2) they exhibit heavily biased reasoning path distributions, which can severely undermine fair evaluation. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel benchmark -- Cross-Modal Multi-Hop Reasoning over Text, Image and Speech with Path Balance (CMR-SPB) -- designed to assess tri-modal multi-hop reasoning while ensuring both unbiased and diverse reasoning paths. Our experiments with the new dataset reveal consistent model failures in specific reasoning sequences and show that biased benchmarks risk misrepresenting model performance. Finally, based on our extensive analysis, we propose a new ECV (Extract, Connect, Verify) prompting technique that effectively mitigates the performance gap across different reasoning paths. Overall, we call for more careful evaluation in CMR to advance the development of robust multimodal AI.