MUSE: A Unified Agentic Harness for MLLMs

Abstract: Despite rapid progress, multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) still fail on tasks that humans solve effortlessly, such as navigating a grid maze from a screenshot or selecting the correct puzzle piece. Rather than retraining the model, we ask a complementary question: how much capability can be elicited from a frozen MLLM purely by improving the execution scaffold around it? We introduce MUSE, a multimodal unified structured execution harness that wraps any off-the-shelf MLLM with composable modules for task representation, visual processing, perception tool use, structured parsing, deterministic verification, and verifier-guided repair, without any model retraining. We evaluate MUSE across diverse benchmarks spanning visual spatial planning, visual perception, multimodal reasoning, and fine-grained visual discrimination, using multiple state-of-the-art MLLMs. MUSE delivers consistent gains over the bare model in all settings, with the largest jumps on challenging instances. Further analysis reveals that many MLLM failures arise from harness-level shortcomings rather than fundamental model deficits, and can be addressed through verifier-guided repair without touching the model. These findings highlight the agentic multimodal harness as a critical yet underexplored design dimension, offering an orthogonal avenue for improving MLLMs beyond model-centric optimization.