Paper Detail

Task-Specific Multimodal Question Answering Agents via Confidence Calibration and Incremental Reasoning for QANTA 2026

Nirjhar Das, Md. Al-Mamun Provath

arxiv Score 22.8

Published 2026-07-10 · First seen 2026-07-13

General AI

Abstract

We present our submission to the QANTA 2026 shared challenge at the ICML 2026 Workshop on Efficient Multimodal Question Answering (EMM-QA). Quanta evaluates multimodal quizbowl systems that answer pyramid-style questions from incrementally revealed text and accompanying images while operating under realistic efficiency constraints. The challenge consists of two distinct tasks: Tossup questions, which require deciding when to answer under uncertainty, and Bonus questions, which emphasize accurate answer selection and human adoption. To address these differing objectives, we develop a task-specific two-agent architecture. Our Tossup agent utilizes a GPT-4o-mini-class model (referred to as GPT-4.1-mini in the competition logs) with confidence-calibrated answering and a domain-specific numeric reasoning policy that reduces overconfident predictions from isolated quantitative clues. Our Bonus agent uses GPT-4o-class model (referred to as GPT-4.1) with leadin-aware reasoning, structured relational reasoning, and multimodal evidence integration to improve exact answer selection. Rather than relying on a retrieval pipeline or model ensembles, our approach emphasizes efficient reasoning policies and confidence calibration within a hosted-only environment. Our system achieved the highest overall leaderboard score of 0.402, including a Tossup score of 0.238 and a Bonus Effect score of 0.164. The results demonstrate that lightweight, task-specific reasoning strategies can provide strong performance on resource-constrained multimodal question answering benchmarks.

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BibTeX

@article{das2026task,
  title = {Task-Specific Multimodal Question Answering Agents via Confidence Calibration and Incremental Reasoning for QANTA 2026},
  author = {Nirjhar Das and Md. Al-Mamun Provath},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {We present our submission to the QANTA 2026 shared challenge at the ICML 2026 Workshop on Efficient Multimodal Question Answering (EMM-QA). Quanta evaluates multimodal quizbowl systems that answer pyramid-style questions from incrementally revealed text and accompanying images while operating under realistic efficiency constraints. The challenge consists of two distinct tasks: Tossup questions, which require deciding when to answer under uncertainty, and Bonus questions, which emphasize accurate},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.09623},
  keywords = {cs.CL, cs.AI},
  eprint = {2607.09623},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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