LiteSearch-VL: Small Multimodal Search Agents via Trajectory Distillation and Synthetic Step-DPO
LiteSearch-VL is a low-compute recipe for Qwen3-VL-2B and Qwen3-VL-4B that uses only released OpenSearch-VL trajectories, parameter-efficient LoRA adapters, and synthetic step-level preferences, identifying answer verification, not search depth, as the next bottleneck for small multimodal agents.