Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on visual question answering (VQA). To mitigate individual hallucinations and blind spots, aggregating diverse perspectives via multi-agent collaboration has emerged as a promising paradigm. While this approach has shown great success in textual QA, its potential in the multimodal domain remains under-explored. Existing multi-agent VQA methods predominantly adapt text-centric protocols, focusing on textual discussions while ignoring the alignment of visual information. In this work, we reveal a key insight: answer-level agreement is insufficient for reliable multi-agent VQA; *aligned visual evidence*—shared support from the image regions agents rely on—is essential for trustworthy consensus. To leverage this insight, we propose **EAGLE** (**E**vidence-**A**ligned **G**rounded mu**L**ti-agent r**E**asoning), a training-free evidence-centered framework for coordinating multiple VLM agents. **EAGLE** explicitly exposes each agent’s grounding regions as visual evidence, enables mutual verification over the evidence, and uses evidence consistency to guide final decision-making. Experiments on six VQA benchmarks show that **EAGLE** achieves best average performance across domains while remaining lightweight, interpretable, and practical for deployment.

With the release of OpenAI’s o1 model, reasoning models that adopt slow-thinking strategies have become increasingly common. Their outputs often contain complex reasoning, intermediate steps, and self-reflection, making existing evaluation methods and reward models inadequate. In particular, they struggle to judge answer equivalence and to reliably extract final answers from long, complex responses. To address this challenge, we propose xVerify, an efficient answer verifier for evaluating reasoning models. xVerify shows strong equivalence judgment capabilities, enabling accurate comparison between model outputs and reference answers across diverse question types. To train and evaluate xVerify, we construct the VAR dataset, consisting of multi-round annotated QA pairs generated by multiple LLMs across challenging reasoning tasks. Experimental results on both test and generalization sets show that all xVerify variants achieve over 95% F1 score and accuracy. Notably, the smallest model, xVerify-0.5B-I, outperforms all evaluation methods except GPT-4o, while xVerify-3B-Ib surpasses GPT-4o in overall performance. In addition, reinforcement learning experiments using xVerify as the reward model yield an 18.4% improvement for Qwen2.5-7B compared with direct generation, exceeding the gains achieved with Math Verify as the reward. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of xVerify. All xVerify resources are available on [GitHub](https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/xVerify).

Modern software development demands code that is maintainable, testable, and scalable by organizing the implementation into modular components with iterative reuse of existing codes. We formalize this iterative, multi-turn paradigm as codeflow and introduce CodeFlowBench, the first benchmark designed to comprehensively evaluate LLMs’ ability to perform codeflow - implementing new functionality by reusing existing functions over multiple turns. CodeFlowBench comprises two complementary components: CodeFlowBench-Comp, a core collection of 5,000+ competitive programming problems from Codeforces updated via an automated pipeline and CodeFlowBench-Repo, which is sourced from GitHub repositories to better reflect real-world scenarios. Furthermore, a novel evaluation framework featured dual assessment protocol and structural metrics derived from dependency trees is introduced. Extensive experiments reveal significant performance degradation in multi-turn codeflow scenarios. Furthermore, our in-depth analysis illustrates that model performance inversely correlates with dependency complexity. These findings not only highlight the critical challenges for supporting real-world workflows, but also establish CodeFlowBench as an essential tool for advancing code generation research.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems often struggle with imperfect retrieval, as traditional retrievers focus on lexical or semantic similarity rather than logical relevance. To address this, we propose HopRAG, a novel RAG framework that augments retrieval with logical reasoning through graph-structured knowledge exploration. During indexing, HopRAG constructs a passage graph, with text chunks as vertices and logical connections established via LLM-generated pseudo-queries as edges. During retrieval, it employs a retrieve-reason-prune mechanism: starting with lexically or semantically similar passages, the system explores multi-hop neighbors guided by pseudo-queries and LLM reasoning to identify truly relevant ones. Experiments on multiple multi-hop benchmarks demonstrate that HopRAG’s retrieve-reason-prune mechanism can expand the retrieval scope based on logical connections and improve final answer quality.

Modern QA systems entail retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for accurate and trustworthy responses. However, the inherent gap between user queries and relevant documents hinders precise matching. We introduce QAEncoder, a training-free approach to bridge this gap. Specifically, QAEncoder estimates the expectation of potential queries in the embedding space as a robust surrogate for the document embedding, and attaches document fingerprints to effectively distinguish these embeddings. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets, languages, and embedding models confirmed QAEncoder’s alignment capability, which offers a simple-yet-effective solution with zero additional index storage, retrieval latency, training costs, or catastrophic forgetting and hallucination issues. The repository is publicly available at https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/QAEncoder.