MAPS: A Multi-Agent Framework Based on Big Seven Personality and Socratic Guidance for Multimodal Scientific Problem Solving

Multimodal scientific problems (MSPs) involve complex issues that require the integration of multiple modalities, such as text and diagrams, presenting a significant challenge in artificial intelligence. While progress has been made in addressing traditional scientific problems, MSPs still face two primary issues: the challenge of multi-modal comprehensive reasoning in scientific problem-solving and the lack of reflective and rethinking capabilities. To address these issues, we introduce a Multi-Agent framework based on the Big Seven Personality and Socratic guidance (MAPS). This framework employs seven distinct agents that leverage feedback mechanisms and the Socratic method to guide the resolution of MSPs. To tackle the first issue, we propose a progressive four-agent solving strategy, where each agent focuses on a specific stage of the problem-solving process. For the second issue, we introduce a Critic agent, inspired by Socratic questioning, which prompts critical thinking and stimulates autonomous learning. We conduct extensive experiments on the EMMA, Olympiad, and MathVista datasets, achieving promising results that outperform the current SOTA model by 15.84% across all tasks. Meanwhile, the additional analytical experiments also verify the model's progress as well as generalization ability.

@article{zhang2025_2503.16905,
  title={ MAPS: A Multi-Agent Framework Based on Big Seven Personality and Socratic Guidance for Multimodal Scientific Problem Solving },
  author={ Jian Zhang and Zhiyuan Wang and Zhangqi Wang and Xinyu Zhang and Fangzhi Xu and Qika Lin and Rui Mao and Erik Cambria and Jun Liu },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.16905},
  year={ 2025 }
}