ViDR: Grounding Multimodal Deep Research Reports in Source Visual Evidence
Recent deep research systems have improved the ability of large language models to produce long, grounded reports through iterative retrieval and reasoning. However, most text-centered systems rely mainly on textual evidence, while multimodal systems often retrieve images only weakly or generate charts themselves, leaving source figures underused as evidence. We present ViDR, a multimodal deep research framework that grounds long-form reports in source figures. ViDR treats source figures as retrievable, interpretable, routable, and verifiable evidence objects, while still generating analytical charts when needed. It builds an evidence-indexed outline linking claims to textual and visual evidence, refines noisy web images into source-figure evidence atoms through context-aware filtering, outline-aware reranking, and VLM-based visual analysis, and generates each section with section-specific evidence. ViDR further validates visual references to reduce hallucinated or misplaced figures. We also introduce MMR Bench+, a benchmark for evaluating visual evidence use in deep research reports, covering source-figure retrieval, placement, interpretation, verifiability, and analytical chart generation. Experiments show that ViDR improves overall report quality, source-figure integration, and verifiability over strong commercial and open-source baselines. These results suggest that source visual evidence is important for multimodal deep research, as it strengthens evidential grounding, visual support, and report verifiability.