A Survey on Foundations and Frontiers of Multimodal Agentic Frameworks: Techniques and Applications
Source: ArXiv AI ↗
Advances in large language models have sparked intensive research into creating agentic frameworks that can reason, plan, and act, and the emergence of large multimodal models now enables these agents to process images, audio, and video alongside text. This survey addresses a previously unmet need by systematically examining how multimodality influences each core component of an agentic system—perception, reasoning, planning, memory, and action—tracing the shift from purely text‑based agents to architectures that integrate multiple sensory streams. The authors categorize integration strategies into delegated, late‑fusion, and early‑fusion designs, linking each architectural choice to the capabilities the resulting agents exhibit, such as grounded perception and multimodal reasoning, and they map these designs onto a modality‑centric taxonomy that clarifies how different modalities expand functional reach.
The review further surveys multimodal agentic systems across four major application domains: robotics, graphical‑user‑interface and web navigation, multimedia content generation and editing, and long‑form video understanding and retrieval. By evaluating performance within these settings, the authors highlight concrete trade‑offs between capability gains and the increased computational demands of training and inference, noting issues of latency, scalability, and deployment constraints that accompany richer sensory inputs. Their analysis underscores that while multimodal integration can dramatically improve real‑world applicability, it also introduces efficiency challenges that must be balanced against the desired level of agentic sophistication.
Concluding, the survey identifies critical gaps—such as limited benchmarks for multimodal agency, underexplored early‑fusion techniques, and the need for more robust memory mechanisms that can handle heterogeneous data—and proposes a roadmap toward building robust, general‑purpose intelligent systems. By focusing on the impact of multimodality, the authors aim to guide future research toward agents that can seamlessly combine perception, reasoning, and action across diverse environments, ultimately advancing the field toward more capable and adaptable AI assistants.
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The U.S.'s central bank rate currently stands at 3.75%, so a global rates move like this could feed through to local borrowing costs. The U.S.'s economy is growing at 2.3% with inflation at 3.2%, the backdrop this story's effects play out against locally. Housing-market effects like this are usually felt most where mortgage rates track the U.S.'s own central bank rate closely. With the U.S.'s unemployment at 4.4%, personal-finance effects like this land on a labour market that is currently fairly stable. Health-system effects are harder to localise from economic indicators alone — the real impact in the U.S. depends more on local healthcare capacity than the figures above.
The UK's central bank rate currently stands at 3.75%, so a global rates move like this could feed through to local borrowing costs. The UK's economy is growing at 0.8% with inflation at 3.2%, the backdrop this story's effects play out against locally. Housing-market effects like this are usually felt most where mortgage rates track the UK's own central bank rate closely. With the UK's unemployment at 5.6%, personal-finance effects like this land on a labour market that is currently fairly stable. Health-system effects are harder to localise from economic indicators alone — the real impact in the UK depends more on local healthcare capacity than the figures above.
France's central bank rate currently stands at 2%, so a global rates move like this could feed through to local borrowing costs. France's economy is growing at 0.9% with inflation at 1.8%, the backdrop this story's effects play out against locally. Housing-market effects like this are usually felt most where mortgage rates track France's own central bank rate closely. With France's unemployment at 7.9%, personal-finance effects like this land on a labour market that is already under strain. Health-system effects are harder to localise from economic indicators alone — the real impact in France depends more on local healthcare capacity than the figures above.
Romania's central bank rate currently stands at 6.5%, so a global rates move like this could feed through to local borrowing costs. Romania's economy is growing at 0.7% with inflation at 7.8%, the backdrop this story's effects play out against locally. Housing-market effects like this are usually felt most where mortgage rates track Romania's own central bank rate closely. With Romania's unemployment at 6%, personal-finance effects like this land on a labour market that is currently fairly stable. Health-system effects are harder to localise from economic indicators alone — the real impact in Romania depends more on local healthcare capacity than the figures above.
The UAE's central bank rate currently stands at 3.65%, so a global rates move like this could feed through to local borrowing costs. The UAE's economy is growing at 3.1% with inflation at 2.5%, the backdrop this story's effects play out against locally. Housing-market effects like this are usually felt most where mortgage rates track the UAE's own central bank rate closely. Health-system effects are harder to localise from economic indicators alone — the real impact in the UAE depends more on local healthcare capacity than the figures above.