AttriSwarm: Orchestrating Agent Swarms for Cross-Page Visual Attribution

Abstract

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) increasingly address knowledge-intensive tasks by integrating evidence scattered across multiple document pages into a final answer. Because such answers are synthesized from many pages, the link between the answer and its supporting visual evidence can become obscured, hindering verification and trust. Cross-page visual attribution is therefore essential: it requires identifying the supporting pages and localizing fine-grained evidence regions within them, thereby making multi-page reasoning transparent and auditable. Existing approaches either process multiple pages jointly or iteratively refine evidence within a single trajectory, risking cross-page context pollution and, for interactive methods, substantial sequential overhead. We introduce \textbf{AttriSwarm}, an agent-swarm framework that assigns these concerns to separate roles: a leader handles global cross-page reasoning, while subagents perform page-wise attribution in isolation and in parallel. To support training and evaluation, we construct \textbf{AttriDoc}, a cross-page QA dataset linking supporting pages to their annotated evidence regions, and use it for role-specific training of AttriSwarm, improving answer accuracy, page-level $F_1$, and region-level IoU over its training-free counterpart by an average of 18.94, 29.34, and 23.04 percentage points, respectively, across three open-source backbones and three datasets.