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Published as a conference paper at NeurIPS 2026

MaRiO: Multi-agent Collaborative Reasoning via Shared Observations in MLLMs

Nathaniel Redmond, Fidel Omar Tito Cruz, Devansh Sharma, Shehreen Azad, Sirshapan Mitra, Shruti Vyas, Yogesh Rawat

Abstract

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show strong visual perception capabilities, but existing evaluations largely focus on single-view or multi-view settings with shared camera parameters, leaving the challenge of multi-agent collaborative scenarios underexplored. In such settings, multiple agents observe a shared environment from independent viewpoints, and reliable decisions require reasoning across these independent observations of the same environment. To study this problem, we introduce **MaRiO**, a benchmark for evaluating multi-agent collaborative reasoning, and evaluate 23 state-of-the-art MLLMs on it. Our analysis reveals three key findings: (1) spatial tasks are generally easier than geometric reasoning tasks; (2) most models struggle to resolve cross-agent correspondences, with errors increasing with scene complexity; and (3) models show limited ability to leverage geometric cues present in the scene. As an initial step toward addressing these challenges, we explore geometry-guided synthetic view augmentation that generates intermediate transition frames between agent observations, providing auxiliary spatial context that improves performance in certain categories. Overall, our results highlight that multi-agent collaborative reasoning remains an open challenge and an important direction for multimodal embodied systems.

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