MRC-MMAgent: Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Role Collaboration in Multimodal Tool-Using Agents

Abstract

Multimodal tool-using agents augment vision-language models with access to external information and capabilities, enabling them to solve knowledge-intensive and visually complex tasks that cannot be addressed using visual context alone. However, existing reinforcement learning pipelines largely train single-role agents to search and answer using terminal rewards, overlooking how humans inspect retrieved evidence, reformulate queries, and revise conclusions during search. Consequently, they fail to optimize this self-corrective process over complete interaction trajectories. We propose MRC-MMAgent, a multi-role collaborative reinforcement learning framework that incorporates trajectory assessment and continuation directly into the executable agent loop. First, the framework establishes a multi-role collaborative loop that integrates solving, inspection, and continuation, enabling the agent to acquire evidence through tools, evaluate the preceding trajectory, and resume problem solving when the current answer is insufficiently supported. Second, we introduce a role-coupled learning objective that combines task success, interaction validity, and successful correction with full-trajectory policy optimization across the decisions generated by all roles. Extensive experiments show that, using only the original baseline training set without constructing additional datasets, our method consistently outperforms the corresponding base models and achieves leading or highly competitive performance across benchmarks.