PhotoCraft: Agentic Reasoning with Hierarchical Self-Evolving Memory for Deep Image Search
Kailin Lyu, Zhiqiang Yuan, Jianwei He, Qiwei Yan, Xuanbo Su, Nanxing Hu, Yang Liu, Ce Hao, Shengqian Qin, Lianyu Hu, Jinchao Zhang, Jie Zhou
Abstract
Deep Image Search requires multi-step reasoning over rich contextual cues, such as time, location, and event relations. However, most existing LLM-based agents are stateless and reactive, lacking persistent memory to maintain long-horizon context or transfer experience across tasks, which often leads to execution drift and experience isolation. To address these limitations, we propose PhotoCraft, a training-free, hierarchical memory system for photo-search agents. Inspired by human cognition, PhotoCraft equips MLLMs with working, episodic, and semantic memory, which are dynamically invoked during reasoning to preserve logical consistency and knowledge transferability throughout multi-step reasoning and answer generation. Extensive experiments on DISBench demonstrate that PhotoCraft consistently improves context-aware retrieval across diverse MLLM backbones, achieving gains of up to 18.5\% and effectively mitigating key bottlenecks in memoryless deep image search, offering a practical path toward reliable and generalizable multimodal search agents.
Topics
Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.