Survey Explores Multimodal Agentic Frameworks and Applications

Neel Mokaria, Rishie Raj, Dheeraj Baiju, Xiaoqian Shen, Shraman Pramanick, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Arda Senocak, Mike Zheng Shou, Philip Torr, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Yapeng Tian, Ruohan Gao, Salman Khan, Sayan Nag, Sanjoy Chowdhury, Dinesh Manocha· August 24, 2026 View original

Key takeaways

  • Multimodality significantly enhances the real-world applicability of AI agentic frameworks.
  • The survey categorizes integration techniques across perception, reasoning, and action.
  • Various architectural designs (fusion types) impact agent capabilities.
  • Multimodal agents are being applied across diverse domains like robotics and content generation.

Who benefits

AI DevelopmentRoboticsMedia & EntertainmentAutomotiveHealthcare

Summary

This survey systematically examines the impact of multimodality on AI agentic frameworks, analyzing how diverse modalities like images and audio are integrated into perception, reasoning, planning, memory, and action modules. It provides a modality-centric taxonomy and reviews applications across various domains.

The rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have spurred extensive research into AI agency, focusing on systems that can reason, plan, and act. With the emergence of large multimodal models (LMMs), these agentic frameworks can now process and integrate diverse data types, including images, audio, and video, significantly broadening their real-world applicability. This comprehensive survey addresses a gap in existing literature by systematically analyzing the role of multimodality within agentic frameworks. It explores how different modalities are integrated across core functional modules: perception, reasoning, planning, memory, and action. The survey traces the evolution from text-centric agents to multimodal systems, detailing delegated, late-fusion, and early-fusion architectures. A modality-centric taxonomy is introduced to link architectural design choices with agent capabilities. The paper reviews multimodal agentic systems across various application domains such as Robotics, GUI & Web Navigation, Multimedia Content Generation & Editing, and Long-form Video Understanding & Retrieval. It also discusses performance, efficiency-scalability trade-offs, including training/inference costs, latency, and deployment constraints, aiming to identify key gaps and outline a roadmap for robust, general-purpose intelligent systems.

Why it matters

For professionals involved in AI development and strategy, this survey provides a crucial overview of the state-of-the-art in multimodal agentic frameworks, highlighting key techniques, applications, and future directions for building more capable and versatile AI systems.

How to implement this in your domain

  1. 1Review the survey to understand the latest techniques in multimodal agent integration.
  2. 2Identify potential applications of multimodal agents within your industry or domain.
  3. 3Evaluate different architectural designs (delegated, late-fusion, early-fusion) for your specific use cases.
  4. 4Assess the efficiency and scalability trade-offs of multimodal agentic systems for deployment.
  5. 5Stay informed on emerging research to leverage advancements in multimodal perception and reasoning.

Original post by Neel Mokaria, Rishie Raj, Dheeraj Baiju, Xiaoqian Shen, Shraman Pramanick, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Arda Senocak, Mike Zheng Shou, Philip Torr, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Yapeng Tian, Ruohan Gao, Salman Khan, Sayan Nag, Sanjoy Chowdhury, Dinesh Manocha

"arXiv:2608.20379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advances in large language models (LLMs) have fueled a wave of research into agency: the ability to reason, plan, and act. This effort has produced agentic frameworks that orchestrate perception, memory, and decision-making around p…"

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Originally posted by Neel Mokaria, Rishie Raj, Dheeraj Baiju, Xiaoqian Shen, Shraman Pramanick, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Arda Senocak, Mike Zheng Shou, Philip Torr, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Yapeng Tian, Ruohan Gao, Salman Khan, Sayan Nag, Sanjoy Chowdhury, Dinesh Manocha on X · view source

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