Paper Detail

ATP-Bench: Towards Agentic Tool Planning for MLLM Interleaved Generation

Yinuo Liu, Zi Qian, Heng Zhou, Jiahao Zhang, Yajie Zhang, Zhihang Li, Mengyu Zhou, Erchao Zhao, Xiaoxi Jiang, Guanjun Jiang

arxiv Score 26.8

Published 2026-03-31 · First seen 2026-04-01

General AI

Abstract

Interleaved text-and-image generation represents a significant frontier for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), offering a more intuitive way to convey complex information. Current paradigms rely on either image generation or retrieval augmentation, yet they typically treat the two as mutually exclusive paths, failing to unify factuality with creativity. We argue that the next milestone in this field is Agentic Tool Planning, where the model serves as a central controller that autonomously determines when, where, and which tools to invoke to produce interleaved responses for visual-critical queries. To systematically evaluate this paradigm, we introduce ATP-Bench, a novel benchmark comprising 7,702 QA pairs (including 1,592 VQA pairs) across eight categories and 25 visual-critical intents, featuring human-verified queries and ground truths. Furthermore, to evaluate agentic planning independent of end-to-end execution and changing tool backends, we propose a Multi-Agent MLLM-as-a-Judge (MAM) system. MAM evaluates tool-call precision, identifies missed opportunities for tool use, and assesses overall response quality without requiring ground-truth references. Our extensive experiments on 10 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal that models struggle with coherent interleaved planning and exhibit significant variations in tool-use behavior, highlighting substantial room for improvement and providing actionable guidance for advancing interleaved generation. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Qwen-Applications/ATP-Bench.

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BibTeX

@article{liu2026atp,
  title = {ATP-Bench: Towards Agentic Tool Planning for MLLM Interleaved Generation},
  author = {Yinuo Liu and Zi Qian and Heng Zhou and Jiahao Zhang and Yajie Zhang and Zhihang Li and Mengyu Zhou and Erchao Zhao and Xiaoxi Jiang and Guanjun Jiang},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Interleaved text-and-image generation represents a significant frontier for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), offering a more intuitive way to convey complex information. Current paradigms rely on either image generation or retrieval augmentation, yet they typically treat the two as mutually exclusive paths, failing to unify factuality with creativity. We argue that the next milestone in this field is Agentic Tool Planning, where the model serves as a central controller that autonomously},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29902},
  keywords = {cs.AI},
  eprint = {2603.29902},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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