UniBrowse: A Data-to-Agent Framework for Multimodal BrowseComp

Xiyu Wei, Qingwei Zong, Zhuocheng Yu, Feng Zhang, Kai Jia, Sujian Li


Abstract
Multimodal BrowseComp tasks require agents to combine perception, tool use, and long-horizon reasoning over dynamic web content, challenging their ability to handle compositional structure, open-world uncertainty, and multimodal integration across extended interactions. Crucially, real-world multimodal browsing involves three distinct information-flow patterns: text-only, image-to-text, and text-to-image, yet existing data construction methods cover only the text-only and image-to-text patterns, leaving text-to-image largely unaddressed and limiting agent generality and robustness. We introduce UniBrowse, a unified data pipeline that for the first time simultaneously generates training data covering all three patterns, augments curated knowledge graphs with live web retrieval for improved fidelity, and introduces a novel metric of exploration degree to filter low-signal instances for efficient reinforcement learning. Through this pipeline, we produce high-quality cold-start tool-use trajectories and exploration-rich QA pairs, and train a 35B-scale agent via supervised fine-tuning and exploration-aware RL. The resulting UniBrowse agent achieves state-of-the-art performance on multimodal BrowseComp benchmarks, attaining an average accuracy of 54.4 across five diverse benchmarks—an improvement of 10.5 points over its base model Qwen3.5-35B-A3B—and surpassing serveral closed-source agent workflows such as GPT-5 (42.9), Gemini-2.5 Pro (44.8), and Gemini-2.5 Flash (41.3).
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.667
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14007–14023
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.667/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiyu Wei, Qingwei Zong, Zhuocheng Yu, Feng Zhang, Kai Jia, and Sujian Li. 2026. UniBrowse: A Data-to-Agent Framework for Multimodal BrowseComp. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 14007–14023, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
UniBrowse: A Data-to-Agent Framework for Multimodal BrowseComp (Wei et al., Findings 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.667.pdf